Recipe: Gluten-free Banana Bread

Preheat your oven to 350, and find a glass loaf pan.

Melt half a stick of butter (that's 4 tablespoons) and let it cool.
(If you're melting it in the microwave, keep a darn eye on it and stop it as soon as it melts, otherwise the solids will explode all over the inside of your appliance. It's gross.)
(Next, time, I will try this with coconut oil.) 

Mash (or mix in your mixer) 3-5 ripe bananas. They should be super, super liquidy and make more than a cup of liquid banana goop. Mix in 1 cup sugar (I combined brown and white) and 1 egg. then that cooled melted butter (if its too far above about 80 degrees, it'll cook bits of egg.) Add a big swig of vanilla extract, and any likely-looking spices. I used quite a lot of Penzey's Pumpkin Pie spice. It was awesome.

Turn off the mixer once all that is combined. Now dump in 1.5 cups of rice flour (mine was 2/3 brown, 1/3 white), a scant tablespoon of baking soda, and a generous teaspoon of salt.

Turn the mixer on LOW and only mix it until everything is barely moistened. Large veins of dry baking soda or snowdrifts of flour are undesirable; however, lumps are fine.

Grease your loaf pan (with butter) and transfer the batter into it. It is heavy, thick and lumpy. It is brown. It does not look or pour like cake batter. It'll be okay. Seriously.

If you want to add walnuts (or black walnuts), I recommend sprinkling them on top. I have a firm  'no surprise nuts' policy, but there's actually a better reason. Having them on top allows the nuts to toast, which makes them taste lots better, and be crunchy. (It also moderates the distinctive but occasionally weird green note in good black walnuts. I think it's a perfect flavor for this bread, but can be overwhelming unless they're toasted.) 

After putting the pan in the oven, lower the temp to 325. DO NOT open the oven for 45 minutes.

Begin checking at 45 minutes with the stab-with-a-butterknife method.  The timing is quite changeable - could be done after 45 minutes,  but occasionally takes more than an hour.  I think it's because of the banana variable.  When the butterknife finally comes out moderately clean - with actual moist crumbs stuck to it, rather than batter - it's done.

This came out moist, tasty, and with a good texture - springy but in no way rubbery. It looked nice, too, and the family ate it enthusiastically. Oddly, it did not have a very strong banana flavor - it was there, but not as banana-y as I would have expected.

This loaf took a long time to get done in the middle, and I worried that the ends would be overdone and hard or gummy - but they totally weren't. I was also worried that the middle would be gritty, but that's what I get for licking the knife - but, again, not at all.  Good consistent texture and rise throughout the loaf.  Deep carmelized sugar flavor. 

Anyway, it was good.

I might add chocolate chips next time. 

This is a rice flour adaptation of the wheat flour recipe I always use. (I happen to have noted, on the page of my recipe notebook, that my brother and I made it on July 15, 1996.) From Easy Basics for Good Cooking.

Valentines day lava cakes

This is the second year in a row that our Valentines Day has been a feast of familial love, rather than the conventional romantic variety. Last year, I made chicken adobo (this one, which sounds just gross at first read but is in fact delicious) and a more complicated variation of the molten chocolate lava cake. I found an easier one this year, and adapted it further (because by the end of a Thursday, I am not up to separating eggs or unearthing a bag of confectioners' sugar from the pantry.)  it's an awful lot like the full-sized French chocolate cake that I made a week or so ago. This is messier, less refined generally, and WAY faster.

I found the recipe on SweetSavoryLife, which looks like a terrific resource; check out the cakes on her bio page!

adapted from Paula Deen’s Home Cooking

Ingredients

• 10 tablespoons (1 1/4 stick) butter
• 8 oz (1 cup) chocolate chips (any type of chocolate chips will work but I recommend semi-sweet or a combination of bitter and semi-sweet)
• 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 1/2 cups confectioners’ (powdered) sugar
• 3 large eggs
• 
  
• 3 egg yolks
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 
  
• Preheat oven to 450 degrees F. Melt about one-and-a-quarter sticks of salted butter and a cup of chocolate chips.  
  

Molten Lava Cakes Recipe

4.2 from 25 reviews

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Recipe type: Dessert

Author: Savory Sweet Life

Prep time: 10 mins

Cook time: 10 mins

Total time: 20 mins

Serves: 6

Molten Lava Cakes adapted from Paula Deen’s Home Cooking

Ingredients

• 10 tablespoons (1 1/4 stick) butter
• 8 oz (1 cup) chocolate chips (any type of chocolate chips will work but I recommend semi-sweet or a combination of bitter and semi-sweet)
• 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 1/2 cups confectioners’ (powdered) sugar
• 3 large eggs
• 3 egg yolks
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• OPTIONAL : 2 tablespoons coffee liqueur (Kahlua) OR 1 tsp. instant coffee powder

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 425 degrees F. Spray 6 -6 ounce custard (ramekin) cups or cupcake tin. In a medium microwavable bowl, melt chocolate chips and butter in the microwave for 60 seconds and then in 30 second increments until smooth (about 1.5-2 minutes total). Add flour and sugar to chocolate/butter sauce. Stir in the eggs and yolks until smooth. Add vanilla and coffee liqueur/instant coffee and mix everything until combined. Divide the batter evenly among the each cups. Place cups on top of a cookie sheet and bake for 10 minutes. The edges should be firm but the center will be runny. Run a knife around the edges to loosen and invert onto dessert plates or you can serve each molten lava cake still in the cup.

Notes

Some optional “finishing” ideas are: sprinkle powdered sugar on top, add a dollop of whipped cream of ice cream, add raspberries or strawberries, or any combination of the above. Enjoy!

• 
  

• Spray 6 -6 ounce custard (ramekin) cups or cupcake tin. In a medium microwavable bowl
• , melt chocolate chips and butter in the microwave for 60 seconds and then in 30 second increments until smooth (about 1.5-2 minutes total). Add flour and sugar to chocolate/butter sauce. Stir in the eggs and yolks until smooth. Add vanilla and coffee liqueur/instant coffee and mix everything until combined. Divide the batter evenly among the each cups. Place cups on top of a cookie sheet and bake for 10 minutes. The edges should be firm but the center will be runny. Run a knife around the edges to loosen and invert onto dessert plates or you can serve each molten lava cake still in the cup.

Notes

Some optional “finishing” ideas are: sprinkle powdered sugar on top, add a dollop of whipped cream of ice cream, add raspberries or strawberries, or any combination of the above. Enjoy!

Gluten- and Dairy-Free Carrot Cake.

Dude. no fooling. My first try at g-free baking was such a success that I am left speechless. I didn't think this could work. 

Carrot Cake adapted by ME!!

Preheat oven to 350, move a rack to the center position.

Grate some carrots (You need 2 cups) and let the grated carrots sit in a colander and dry out for about 10 minutes. Meanwhile, drain a 20 oz can of crushed pineapple in juice.

Beat 4 large eggs, one scant cup granulated sugar, and one cup vegetable oil. And beat them and beat them and beat them, longer than you think could possibly be necessary, so they are as light-colored and foamy as they can get. This will work better if the eggs are close to room temperature - it makes them less gloppy. Add in the carrots and the pineapple, plus a cup of dried cranberries (Craisens).

(I didn't say it was a low-sugar recipe.)

In a separate bowl mix:
one scant cup white rice flour
one cup brown rice flour
1 teaspoon (or a small palm-full) salt
2 teaspoons baking soda 
dry spices depending on your taste. Be generous. I used at least tablespoon of cinnamon, plus a generous shake of allspice. Use a LOT.

(If you're using a powerful mixer, you don't really need to pre-mix the dry ingredients - you can just throw them into the bowl with the wet stuff.)

Stir in 2 teaspoons of vanilla extract; you can throw in a cup of nuts now, if you like. Walnuts are good.

Drop into greased muffin tins; you can fill them most of the way, a little more than you would with another cake batter. Bake at 350 for 25-35 minutes.

I have not tried these in a full-sized cake pan, so I don't know what effect it would have. They do rise in muffin tins, some.

They don't need icing, really. Also, DON'T seal them in plastic bags - the moisture will condense into, like, slush. This is good advice for all baked goods, but with something as moist as this, it's really important.

to me, these are indistinguishable  the wheat flour ones.  I'm stunned.

It's been a month. Have some cake.

At the moment:
the kid is sick.
the husband is at the grocery.
I am covered with paint.
Also chocolate.

(I scraped a little something off my shirt and licked my finger a moment ago, not thinking that it might have been acrylic rather than cake batter. I lucked out.)

THIS is my favorite cake recipe, combining, as it does, ease, pantry ingredients, deliciousness and fanciness.

I found this in a La Madeleine cookbook that my brother gave me years ago. As near as I can tell, this book is not currently available (which is kind of a drag, because it's quite good and I can't find my copy, but it does make me feel better about putting the recipe here.)

Cake Tres Simple

Put some water on to boil, and preheat the oven to 400.

In addition to a cake pan and a couple of bowls, you'll need a large pan to use as a bain marie, some parchment or foil, and a spoon rest.

Put 2 sticks of butter and 9 oz of chocolate in a bowl. (I usually combine a cup of chocolate chips with 3 oz of unsweetened baking chocolate.) Melt this by nuking 30 seconds, stirring with a fork of a minute or so, and repeating until its completely smooth and liquid.

Transfer this to the bowl of your mixer, if you have one. Mix in:
4 eggs (one at a time)
then 1 cup of sugar (a quarter cup at a time)
then 3/4 cup of flour (also a quarter cup at a time.) Scrape down the sides and mix one more time.

To prepare the pan - butter a cake pan, and cut a circle of parchment or foil to fit the bottom of the pan. Dust the pan with cocoa (FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE, DO THIS OVER THE SINK. SERIOUSLY.) Transfer the batter into the cake pan - it's thicker than regular batter, you'll have to spread it in the pan.

When the oven is ready, put the larger bain marie pan on a middle rack, pour in about an inch of hot water, then gently place the filled cake pan in it.

Bake for 25 minutes, then start checking. The cake forms sort of a 'crust' on the outside, while the inside stays a little gooey (in a good way.) A knife or toothpick should come out mostly clean. It'll be done somewhere between 30 and 50 minutes.

Ideally, you would let this cool completely in the pan, and let it rest overnight. To serve, unmold it onto a plate, gently peel off the parchment, and dust with powdered sugar.

This is a serious cake.

(After) Dinner Tonight: P Party cake

We have our challenges, we parents. We parents of shockingly willful preschoolers. (At least, I am shocked. Oddly, no one else seems particularly shocked. Hmm.) Anyway, when he almost-willingly used a public restroom this afternoon, I declared that we would have a party. With cake.

This recipe is a cake I grew up with – it was a staple at class parties and church suppers, usually with no icing. The recipe is in plenty of places; I noticed it’s even in the most recent issue of Martha Stewart Everyday Food, where it mentions it’s in a new cookbook called “Mad Hungry.” It’s called Busy Day Cake there, which is a good name, and cooks.com calls it vinegar cake - but to me, it was always Crazy Cake. (Until today.)

This recipe has a ton of advantages. You mix, bake and serve it in one dish, so all you have to wash today is a measuring cup and 2 spoons. It’s vegan, it’s natural, it’s very cheap. But the reason I made it today – we were out of eggs. I felt that taking the little darling to the supermarket would be, um, pushing my luck. It’s definitely a ‘pantry staples’ dish.

Crazy Cake can turn out heavy, but the one I made today was quite light and flavorful and had nice textures - chewy outside, tender inside and a little touch of gooey at the center.

Heat your oven to 350 degrees.

In a pyrex cassarole or an 8-inch square baking pan, whisk together:

1.5 cups flour, 1 cup sugar, 3 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder, 1 teaspoon baking soda, and half teaspoon salt. You can also throw in a little cayenne pepper, chili powder or nutmeg…I thought I was being all clever and sophisticated, but I couldn’t taste them.

Make a well in center of dry mix and pour in 6 tablespoons vegetable oil, 1 teaspoon vanilla extract, 1 tablespoon white vinegar, and 1 cup cold water. Stir till smooth. This is when I threw in a couple handfuls of semi-sweet chocolate chips. These are a great addition, but some sunk – if I had thought of it earlier and put them in with the dry ingredients, it would have been better. Bake until a chopstick inserted in center comes out clean. In a square pan, this will be about 40 minutes. – with the cassarole dish, which was deeper and smaller, it took about an hour. You're supposed to let it cook completely, but it's really good while it's still a tiny bit warm.

Bonus tip: Best Icing Ever, I am completely serious:

I improvised some buttercream the way I always do – cream soft butter (regular, not unsalted), add a drip of vanilla, and confectioners sugar by the spoonful, scrape down the sides of the bowl, keep tasting…but today, I threw in a chunk of cream cheese. Whip until fluffy. This is more definitely the best icing I have ever made, and it may be the best icing I have ever eaten.

I made pie!

I made pie crust, more noteably, which I had never done before. I found a butter pastry recipe in my beloved and completely unbound Easy Basics for Good Cooking.

Put 1 cup of flour in your food processor.
Add 6 tablespoons of cold butter and a small amount of salt.
Pulse the food processor a few times. In much less than a minute, you'll have a bowl of even, uniform tiny lumps of buttered flour.
Break 1 egg into the food processor, and pulse a couple more times until it comes together into one smooth lump.

Wrap the lump in plastic wrap and stash it in the fridge for a while. (The recipe calls for one hour, but I had it in a lot less than that.)

I filled this with 3 chunked apples and 2 handfuls of frozen cranberries, tossed with sugar, cinnamon, allspice, a splash of apple cider, and a spoonful of cornstarch. Ian helped me gently place the top crust on, and was very happy to poke holes in it. Baked at 425 until the top was brown and crispy, the filling was bubbly, and you can pierce the apple with a table fork. Like 40 minutes or so. (I had to cover the top with a piece of foil for the last part of the baking.)

I thought I had rolled this crust out way too thin, but it came out great! It took a lot for me to not STAND THERE AND EAT THE ENTIRE PIE.

I also made a great apple dessert last night, which I'll tell you about some other time.

world's easiest cookie:

This is a cookie I remember from my childhood (from other kids' houses - I don't recall my dad making cookies at our house. Cakes yes - cookies, not that I can recall, except the sliced Pillsbury roll.)

Anyway, there are lots of complicated recipes for these on the web, but there's NO EXCUSE for working hard at making this cookie. 4 ingredients, 12 minutes.

Preheat oven to 350.
Grease a cookie sheet (spray grease is fine for this.)

Mix together:

1 cup peanut butter
(regular commercial stuff, smooth or crunchy - I've never tried it with natural peanut butter yet.)
1 cup granulated sugar (you could skimp on this; one recipe I saw suggested using Splenda, which I think would work fine, though I haven't tried.)
1 egg.

When completely mixed, roll into balls. Bake at 350 for 9-10 minutes. They don't turn brown, just look a little dryer.

While they're in the oven, unwrap some Hershey's kisses, dark or plain milk chocolate.

When you take the cookies out of the oven, remove them to a plate. and squish a kiss into the center of each.

Good warm, good cold. Good smooth, good crunchy. They even survive a little burn (I burned the first batch on Saturday. Still good.) Makes 18-24, depending on how big you make the balls.

5 min chocolat cake: The results

eh.

It's not exactly like cake, but not totally different, either - maybe more like plum pudding in texture (sproingy around the outside, very moist inside where the melted chocolate is.) The body of the cake itself was moist and eggy but not very flavorful and not noticeably chocolate-y, despite the cocoa. I wonder if some aggressive spicing, like with cinnamon/allspice, might make that better.

I HATE it when baked goods are warmed in the microwave, because when they cool, they can become so leathery as to be inedible. I was afraid that this would be the downfall of this recipe, but it's not - I guess because it had never been baked to begin with - the texture doesn't change much as it cools, which is good.

I couldn't eat the whole serving. About a third of one, with a good glob of lightly-sweetened whipped cream, could be a very passable dessert. And certainly a good basis for experiments.

Triple Feature

So I was familiar with the Who album Tommy

(side note: my husband was born in 1961. There's not even a full year separating us. Somehow he grew up being a Who/Moody Blues/Beatles person, with a decent dash of Herman's Hermits. While I - born in 1962 - grew up a Clash/Talking Heads/REM/Devo person. My point is this - I was familiar with Tommy the album because of Eric.

And he is completely, utterly sick of Stop Making Sense and Murmur because of me.)

So while I was waiting for Project Runway Season 5 to start, I tuned into VH1Classic (oh, don't start) and watched the last third of Tommy the Ken Russel movie. I think I missed all the good parts, and was left with the too-long messianic holiday camp part. While this is not actually a good movie in any recognizable sense, I would certainly watch it again - and especially if I had copies of Godspell and Superstar on hand. That would be quite an afternoon.

Dinner tonight was this, which was wholesome, nourishing, and tragically dull. It needs SOMETHING mixed in with the potato filling, some texture, some big flavor - maybe roasted onions or big chunks of olives. Or some capers in the pan sauce.

Hmmm, sounds like I'll be making this again, doesn't it?

Since dinner was boring, I made cupcakes. They are delicious.

Honestly, I am not a dependable cake baker at all. I like making cakes, but they don't usually come out delectable. I have a couple of go-to recipes - an almost-flourless chocolate cake from an old La Madelaine cookbook that my brother found for me, and the very best pound cake in the world - and they always work. But chances are that other recipes will be a little dry, a little heavy, just not as lovely as I imagine.

I actually have a suspicion that these are a little dry, from being overcooked, but I ate two earlier and cannot possibly squeeze in another, even for the purposes of critique.
The flavor is great, though.

What not to cook

Please do not use your perforated aluminum baguette pan to make french bread pizzas. Oh, it seems like a genius idea - it seems like it would cradle the halved loaf beautifully, keeping it from listing to one side and dumping its cheese. And it seems like it would ensure a wonderfully crisped crust.

And it does both those things, perfectly. And the pizza will come out really really good.



And then you will spend your evening wondering how to get the baked-on cheese off the pan, intertwined, as it has become, with the hundreds of tiny holes.

So any effort that you have saved by making a simple, barely-any-cooking-but- still-pretty-delicious dinner for the fam will be more than made up for in clean-up. And then you'll remember - oh, right, cooking is the part I LIKE. It's washing dishes I hate.

In the crock pot for tomorrow night - some kind of weird chicken thing, an improvisation based on this recipe (from the library) which I started making and then realized that I had hardly any of the ingredients called for.

Full report if we survive eating it tomorrow night.

EDITED TO ADD: It's been almost 4 hours, and apparently we are not dying, despite eating chicken legs cooked at the low setting of our 30-year-old crock pot. Not bad. Needs more ginger and more vegetation.

It is taking absolutely all my intestinal fortitude (uh, heh?) to not google "salmonella".

I should just google "hypochondria" instead.

Two recipes for today:

1. Orange Bread Barbados (or: Breakfast in Bread! Ha!)
from Al Dente -
I made a couple loaves of this before dinner - one for us, one for the neighbors who just had a baby. It's delicious - light, subtle, with a gorgeous fluffy texture inside and a crispy crust. (The recipe says it comes out "dense", which mine didn't, but I agree that it's "buttery, citrusy" and "fresh".)

I made it precisely per the recipe (!) but I think it would work fine with more zest, a little lemon juice and zest added in, some chopped dried cranberries or cherries, or even my current ingredient crush, mashed banana.

I think the subtlety might be due, in part, to the fact that I used low acid/no pulp orange juice.

But it's perfectly lovely, fast, and made of stuff we had lying around the kitchen. Hard to beat that. (That photo's not of mine, btw. It's from SmittenKitchen, where it illustrates a really good post about bread baking. Go read it.)



2. shrimp and spaghetti in coconut broth from June's Rachel Ray magazine
I didn't actually follow the recipe (because it make 3 meals worth and calls for FOUR POUNDS OF SHRIMP, are you kidding me?)
but instead improvised something similar with smaller quantities of everything. Well, not everything - cilantro does not cross our threshold under any circumstances, and I was sadly lacking fish sauce. But it was still good - fast, easy, delicious, pleasantly messy, and the shrimp did not have time to get rubbery (my pet peeve.) The broth is a lot like tom ka gai, which is my favorite soup and high on my list of favorite foods.




Next time I make this, I will have that, and use less of this stuff:

because I think I have been abusing my husband with it.
(He's very nice about it.)




This, by the way, is both cooking and food blogging as procrastination. Sunday's sermon does not appear to be writing itself. As Paul says, others are merely amateur crastinors, but I am a pro.

Is it me? Really? Seriously, you can tell me. It's me, isn't it?

So I finally made some of this freakin' No Knead Bread that the entire bake-o-sphere has been on about for a year.

The backstory: Mark Bittman, my #1 favorite in the pantheon of favorite food writers, wrote about this idea in his column for the NYTimes Wednesday food section last November. Read it here. I must admit, I scoffed. That cannot work, I said.

But a whole lot of people got excited about this recipe, and this technique (if, in fact, leaving something in the fridge for a couple of days could be called a technique.) (And, as I consider my love of brined poultry, I guess it can.) Really, it has been the talk of the food-blogosphere.

I was looking something up on Jaden's Steamy Kitchen, which I love, and saw that she was pimping a technique that she said was even easier and resulted in a loaf that was even tastier - from a cookbook called Artisan Bread in 5 Min a Day. Seriously, who could resist that?

So on Saturday I whipped up a bowl of this dough. And tonight I baked some off. The third loaf is in the oven right now for another couple of minutes. We've eaten one small loaf - I had planned to have it with dinner, but it didn't get done in time, so now it's not dinner, it's just an experiment.

Here are the things I think I did wrong:
I may not have used enough salt.
I think I may have played with the dough too much.
I definately didn't give those first two loaves enough time to proof today between fridge and oven.

It was never spectacularly wet and sticky like the dough Bittman talks about - after just a little while on the counter, it was more springy and earloby, like regular bread dough after some turns in the KitchenAide.

The result:
The crust is really excellent. No complaints there. (The bread I bake normally is famous for its crust, but the famous crust is the product of a fairly fiddly process involving ice water, a pump-spray bottle, and way too many oven-door-openings for a house with a toddler in it. This is definately the best crust I have ever had without the insane fiddling.)

The crumb (the soft inside part) is soft, medium dense, uniform rather than bubbley or interestingly textured. I was disappointed in this, especially after seeing the gorgeous photos like this one:
from Steamy Kitchen.

She also raves about the flavor, and this is where the evidence lies that I have gone wrong somewhere. The flavor of my loaves is decent, but it's not great.

On the scale of bread flavor (0 being a white hoagie roll at Subway, decidedly far worse than Wonderbread, and 10 being Peter Rinhart's Brother Juniper slow-rise French Bread made at home - dude, this was a 4. That's me, being charitable. A charitable 4.

Ideas for next time:
I could always try FOLLOWING THE DIRECTIONS.
I could go with the Bittman/Sullivan Street recipe (which has no sugar)(which is where I think the flavor problem may lie.)

I have to say, though - I was wrong. This really is easy and fast, and it really does result in a loaf of bread with some seriously good characteristics.

Figures that I would start experimenting with this at the END of winter, doesn't it? You'll be able to spot our house this summer. It'll be the one that runs the air conditioning all day and night, with the tip jar on the porch.

And it'll smell awesome.