Chocolate bananas in paradise

Ooooh. Totally in love with chocolate and bananas all mushed up into a bit of heaven: which conflicts horribly with my attempts to swear off chocolate! My camera's bitten the dust so at the moment I'm a bit short in the "photo of our favourite chocolate cake of the moment" photo, but maybe that can come later? I do have pictures though of our chocolate banana oatmeal cookies and our banana bread chocolate cake to stimulate you and get you softening butter. So read on and turn the oven on!

Banana Chocolate Chunk Oatmeal Cookies

In light of most schools being nut-free and it being back to school season, I've taken the nuts out of this equation. Feel free to pop them back in if circumstances allow (pecans or walnuts: personally I think it's overload with the nuts, but on the other hand it's added protein). Unlike some chocolate chip cookies, these stay moist and fresh-tasting all day. Gorgeous.


3/4 cup butter
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup white sugar
1 and 1/2 tsp vanilla
1 egg
1 large banana (or about half a cup)
1 cup white flour
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 cup rolled oats (the kind you cook for three minutes to make oatmeal)
chocolate chunks or chips to taste

You know the drill, right? Cream the butter and add the sugar. Blend the sugar, and add the egg and vanilla. Mush that together (spoon or mixer), then add the banana. Now it's getting really wet, right? Add in the dry ingredients (which you've mixed together beforehand, right?). When everything's blended add in the oatmeal then the chocolate. As much chocolate as can be reasonably accomodated in the cookies. Bake for about 12 minutes at 375. Mmmmm


Banana Bread with chocolate icing

for years I've been baking this as straight-up banana bread and then - did I mention I've got a problem with chocolate? - I thought, I'm going to ice this sucker and chocolate it up a bit! So make it as straight up banana bread (in which case you need to bake it for longer and, in the case of my loving oven, tent it against scorching) or put it in two pans and bake for 20 minutes or so, cool and ice. Either way it's the absolute best banana bread in the world. Seriously.

1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 1/2 cups white flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp vanilla
1 cup mashed bananas (two big or about 3 small, should be a cup though)
1/2 cup yogurt (or sour cream or 1/3 cup keffir: I usually use plain no sugar no gelatin yogurt)

Cream the butter and add the sugar. Mix that til you're bored. Get it out of your system now, instead of at the flour stage: overmixing flour in anything but bread makes it tough and rubbery. So mix the butter-sugar well instead if you're that way inclined. Add eggs, mix well. Stir the dry ingredients together and add to the wet. Add banana-mush, yogurt and vanilla. Stir well. Pour into buttered and lightly sugared loaf pan or two cake pans (hmmm ... heart shaped pans would be nice). Bake about an hour for the loaf, 20 minutes for the pans.

Chocolate icing (for any cake at all).

1/2 cup butter (very soft)
3/4 cup sifted icing sugar (if you don't sift, you get lumps, see lumpy icing in the photo where I got all lazy and instantly regretted it)
1/4 cup cocoa (sifted, see above)

Stir up the butter till it's creamy add icing sugar and cocoa and mush it all up! Ice the cake (which you've let cool for half an hour at least: it tastes incredible slightly warm with the icing, on the other hand it's hard to ice a warm cake without the icing slithering down onto the cake plate). Enjoy!

Chocolate and banana pecan crumble cake (adapted from UK Country Living)

1 cup brown sugar
3/4 butter cup
1 cup good dark chocolate
2 small bananas
2 eggs
1 1/2 cups white flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt

For the crumble topping
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup pecans, chopped
1/2 cup chocolate chips

Butter two cake pans. Melt the butter, chocolate, sugar together and then add the smushed bananas. Next add the eggs and stir the bananas in and mix well. Next fold in the dry ingredients. Pour half into the pan. Crazy-easy cake! Next, make the crumble: just chop nuts, mix with sugar and add in chocolate chips. Put half the crumble on top of the half the batter in the pan, then the rest of the batter, then the rest of the crumble. Pop it in the oven for about 40 minutes (or 20 if your stove is a maniacal 63 year old General Motors model like mine). Let cool about 15 before turning out (some of the crumble will fall off, pile it back on!).

rose cake for the end of summer

School starts soon, and the evenings are feeling cooler. The province is on fire, but down here in the city it seems like summer's drawing to a close. I can't imagine making this cake anytime but summer, preferably in July with rose petals from my Ispahan bush in the back garden. You want rose petals with scent so commercial flowers won't do, and Old Roses are preferred. Perhaps some of you still have roses blooming, somewhere in the blogosphere?


Rose Petal Cake

3 eggs

1 cup of sugar

1 cup of butter, softened

1 tsp rose water

1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 cup sour cream or yogurt

rose petals for the inside and top of cake

GLAZE:

1 tablespoons rose water

6 tablespoons lemon juice

1 1/2 cups icing sugar

Whipping cream for the middle of the cake

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour a 9 inch cake pan.

Beat the butter and sugar together until light. Add in the eggs and rose water.

Add half the flour mixture, and stir in. Add half the sour cream, a handful of rose petals and then add the rest of the flour and sour cream.

Pour the mixture into the cake pan and bake for 35-40 minutes or until a cake tester or toothpick inserted into the thickest part of the cake comes out clean. Cool in the pan for 10 minutes, then invert onto a cake rack.Once cooled, slice in two and lay one half on a plate.

Next, make the glaze. Sift the icing sugar into a small saucepan and put on low heat. Add the juice and whisk to break up any lumps.

Whip some whipping cream and put in the middle of the cake, then add the top half. While the cake is still warm, using a long skewer (or just a toothpick), poke holes all around the top of the cake. Drizzle the syrup over the cake. Sprinkle with some gorgeous rose petals and reserve some to serve with each slice.

It's all about the breakfast

Lately I've been trying to appease my sweet tooth and my desire to eat in a way that nourishes my body as well as tastebuds by at least starting the day with good intentions fulfilled. To that end I've been eating a lot of wholewheat toast with hemp seeds sprinkled on top and a half a banana sliced and smushed in. Sometimes for lunch too. And this generally works pretty well for me. The kids, however, get a little fed up with their toastly versions of this (marmite for him, peanut butter and homemade jam for her, dulce de leche for both) and so weekdays we sometimes have scones and Sundays are always pancakes. Which they never seem to tire of. Mostly we have buttermilk pancakes with - a small attempt to pretend they're healthy - a quarter of a cup of ground flax seed mixed in. Covered in berries and maple syrup of course, these are not punitive pancakes but happy Sunday ones!

Buttermilk Pancakes

1 3/4 cups flour
1/4 cup flax seed
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
2 tablespooons sugar
2 eggs
3 cups of buttermilk
2 tablespoons butter

Combine dry ingredients. Mix eggs with buttermilk and butter. Add to dry. Butter the griddle and spoon batter on. After it's stopped oozing you can add a wee bit more to make the pancakes higher if you like. We like ours singly and large and sometimes in the shape of cat or bear heads. Once bubbles form it's a good time to flip the pancakes. Be confident and flip all of a sudden. Pancakes not taken by surprise sometimes don't flip as well. Cook on the reverse side for about one minute.

things which are nice on top of pancakes:
Maple syrup
lemon juice and icing sugar
toasted and chopped pecans
peaches, raw sliced or fried in a bit of butter and cinnamon
bananas (love maple syrup!)
granola (the crunch is a nice surprise in a pancake)
berries, lots of berries, fresh or compote

Useful toil and the ready snap

Max and I had a fabulous BC Day. We ate pancakes (grilled peaches in butter and cinnamon on top, mmmmm), made pickles (spicy garlic dill cucumbers and another jar of pickled dragon's tongue beans: I haven't made pickles for years and it's made me feel gloriously in charge of my destiny. Canning has that effect on me - a sort of putting one over on the man combined with pleasure at having what may pass as a skill), Max continued on his amazing Lego Star Wars restaurant board, went to St Anne's to listen to music (which may have been quite good: turns out Max has the same appreciation for listening to bands that he has for shopping for ladies' shoes). There was a great deal of tsking and sighing and a low sort of moaning noise such as a very sad cow might make coming from my darling boy till I gave up and took him to the Inner Harbour so he could indulge his strange passion for looking at Weird Stuff We Sell to Tourists.

Then we came home and had quite wonderful dinner of grilled peppers pureed with feta cheese on pasta followed by homemade oat bars (he got to help pick out the dried fruit and was pretty excited about them). Just my kind of day (bar the part where we can't chill out and listen to music because " the older lady dancing is scaring me")!

wood blocks, lino engraving etc

I cannot underestimate how much I love etchings. Not sure what is that does it for me, the simplicity of line perhaps? The kids and I had a birthday dinner last year for me in a Japanese restaurant and we were all three transfixed by the woodcuts. There's some pretty sweet British work out there right now, often with a nostalgic bent to it. Check out Emily Sutton www.stjudeprints.co.uk/collections/emily-sutton and Angie Lewin www.angielewin.co.uk/gallery.htm#gallery Doesn't that just make you sing?

Rats! Foiled again

After starting this I lost touch with the whole blogging notion for quite some time (no idea why: what on earth was I doing?). By the time I got back to it blogspot had lost the memory of my account being linked to it, or in a moment of madness I created a special account, or something, but at any rate I no longer had access to sugarwitch the original. And being in a dogmatic frame of mind and not wishing to rename the blog we now arrive at sugarwitch2. Let's see if I can actually keep this one up!

Adult-oriented chocolate chip cookies

I'm never sure if I like strong flavours and kitchen-sink pizzas because that's the way my tastebuds are, or if they are that way because I overwhelmed the poor devils with a too-long relationship with Tabasco sauce. A relationship that segued into a destructive romance with kimchi, banana peppers on and in everything and chilli pepper flakes.

I'm off all those things now, but am left with a leaning toward stronger flavours. So I don't just like chocolate chip cookies (though good ones are very fine), I like them with additions. One of my favourite additions is green tea.

Chocolate Matcha Cookies

These are gorgeously moreish. The chocolate hits your tongue first and just as you are thinking “I can’t taste the green tea” it comes in, beautifully complementing the chocolate chips. They turn out a lovely natural shade of green, not at all lurid or St. Patrick’s Dayish. You can find small tins of green tea powder, or matcha, in some groceries and in Japanese groceries or on-line.

½ cup butter
¾ cup brown sugar
1 ¼ cup flour
1 egg
½ teaspoon baking soda
1 tablespoon matcha
pinch of salt

chocolate chips to taste

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees. Mix the butter and brown sugar til creamy, then blend in the egg. In your measuring cup mix the dry ingredients (flour, baking soda, pinch of salt and matcha), and combine this with the butter and sugar mixture. Stir in the chocolate chips. Drop cookies onto a baking sheet and bake for 10 – 12 minutes or until cookies don’t look wet anymore.

Sunday, May 31, 2009

The kids and I went to a sweet potluck at Rennie and Alec's place last night. Partly because it was Shavuot, partly because the Rabbi was up here (from the Bay area where she lives) and partly because it was Brasley's bar mitzvah. At least I think those were the reasons. Perhaps also partly because Alex and Rennie felt like throwing a party.

Now people who know me know I've got a very short attention span for driving (I enjoy it and then *woops* now I'm done) so was muttering to myself about people who live On the Peninsula instead of in town like normal mortals. But having been out there, I get it. It's quite something. They live on a little orchard which, while perched above the highway, is not in sight of the highway. Somehow the highway falls into a valley and what you do see is the lake on the other side of the highway but no cars at all. Can't hear them either. So it's orchard, green bit, lake. Luverly. And lovely dinner and desserts (with requisite cheesecake).

Of course I ate too much. Potlucks are my nemesis! If food is there I eat and I do not stop until it is gone. So if I do something silly like bring Kettle Chips into my house, I put them in a small bowl and, leaving the bag in the kitchen, take the small bowl into the tv room as I know I'm too idle to get up again. I also know I've got no self-control when it comes to grease and salt and butter and sugar so make sure I have small portions, then try to walk away. Potlucks though, there's no escape!!

Plus there was cheesecake. :mad: Tomorrow it's mashed bananas and yogurt for breakfast and lettuce with orange juice dressing (nothing else, just oj) on top. I refuse to buy a whole new set of clothes in a different size so as soon as my clothes start feeling tight I cut back. And go to the gym. Damn you middle-age and your weight-gaining properties!