Adventures in Baking, part 2

So one week, I bought a clump of bananas. Stupid me didn't realize that when you put bananas on top of a refrigerator, the heat makes them age faster. So I had to find a way to make the remaining three bananas last for a couple days. Enter Banana Bread! Banana bread was a rare treat at my place, but I loved it a lot. However, my mom came over one night and I told her my plan to bake some banana nut bread. I didn't give her enough notice to bring me whatever recipe was at home, so we scoured the internet together to find a recipe that seemed fairly easy enough and what she thought had the right ingredients for a "perfect" banana bread.

After searching through a couple recipes, I found the one on this site, and it was mom-approved.

Part of its appeal was not the need for a mixer, as I don't have a good stand up mixer, just a small hand mixer.

Ingredients

-3 or 4 ripe bananas, smashed (you want the bananas to be almost inedible)

-1/3 cup melted butter

-1 cup sugar (can easily reduce to 3/4 cup)

-1 egg, beaten

-1 teaspoon vanilla extract

-1 teaspoon baking soda

-pinch of salt

-1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

Method

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Farenheit.

With a woodens spoon, mix butter into the mashed bananas in a large mixing bowl.

Mix in the sugar, egg, and vanilla.

Sprinkle the baking soda and salt over the mixture and mix in.

Add the flour last, mix.

Pour mixture into a buttered 4x8 inch loaf pan (I used a loaf pan the next size up).

Bake for 1 hour.

Cool on a rack, remove from pan, and slice to serve.

The problem is that with my oven, it cooks a lot faster than I realized. So while I was trying to make sure the middle of the loaf was fully cooked, the tops and outsides of the loaf got slightly burned. So here is the result on my end:

As you can see, the very end of the bread got burned.

The ends were bad bad bad. But if you cut away the burned parts of the bread, it was PHENOMENAL. Like I said, I wanted banana nut bread, so I added a 1/2 cup of chopped walnuts into the mix. I added them as the very last ingredient, after the flour.

So, like I said, I had never cooked or baked much before, so when I went to pour the mix into the loaf pan, I was very confused as to why my batter looked kind of like extra lumpy cake batter. If you've baked this type of bread before, I'm sure you're probably laughing at me right now. But if you're wanting a pretty easy banana nut bread recipe, definitely try this out.

I'm definitely going to try this again, but in muffin form. And I now know that anytime I am baking, I just need to lower the temperature on my oven about 15-20 degrees. My oven cooks hot for some reason. If you try this out, let me know!

Adventures in Baking

In all the cooking that I had done in my apartment, I very rarely ever baked. And when I did, it was something straight from a box. I have seen and tasted WONDERFUL homemade things, so I decided I wanted to try my hand at making something from scratch.I used my February visit to Norman as an excuse to bake some homemade cupcakes to take to my friends while I was visiting them.

I asked one friend in particular if he preferred vanilla or chocolate cupcakes, and then hunted the internet for a fairly easy vanilla cupcake recipe.

Here are the cupcakes before they were iced:

Recipe (taken from here):

Yields 12-16 cupcakes

Ingredients

-3/4  cup butter (not margarine)

-3 eggs

-2 1/2 cups all purpose flour

-1/2 teaspoon salt

-1 3/4 cups sugar

-3 Tablespoons vanilla extract

-1 1/4 cups milk

-2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

Instructions

• Prior to starting, get the eggs and butter to room temperature. Grease and flour 2 cupcake/muffin tins, or add cupcake wrappers to trays.

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
2. In a separate bowl, stir together the salt, baking powder, and flour.
3. Beat butter in an electric mixer on high for 30 seconds. Add sugar and beat until combined. Continue to beat and add the eggs. Beat well and add vanilla extract.
4. Add part of the flour mixture, then part of the milk and beat on low. Repeat until all of the milk and flour mixture have been added. Combine and spread batter into cupcake pans.
5. Bake for 15-18 minutes, until the cupcakes are golden brown and toothpick comes out clean from the center. Cool for at least 15 minutes then remove from pans. Frost cupcakes as desired.

Things I learned while making these: You definitely need quite a few bowls for this. I just did not have enough. Make sure the butter is beat well before you start adding other things because you'll get chunks of butter in your mix if you don't. Don't fill the cupcake wrappers all the way to the top. The cupcakes come out HUGE!

I wanted to make some homemade strawberry icing, but the recipe that I wanted to use had weird ingredients, so I just ended up buying already made strawberry frosting:

The cupcakes were GOOD. I just haven't made these again since then, and I want to make a vanilla bean cupcake that links to the page I found this recipe on.