It was a rainy day today, the sort of pouring from the sky that one could shower in if it wasn't so darned chilly. The wind seeped into the house and almost made my normally very hot feet wish for some cozy slippers.
Since it was cool, I decided to do some baking to warm the house up. First up was banana chip muffins.
Here they are in all their delicious glory. Minus one. Quality control, you know. I tried many, many recipes but I could never find one that wasn't dry. A friend gave me this one and it's now our family favourite. It's very moist. You don't have to drink a gallon of milk afterwards.
BEST BANANA BREAD
3/4 cup margarine
1 1/2 cups sugar
3 or 4 medium bananas
2 eggs, beaten
1 tsp vanilla
2 cups all purpose flour
3/4 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
3/4 cup chopped pecans or walnuts
1/2 cup buttermilk or sour cream
Preheat oven to 325F. Cream the margarine and sugar until light and fluffy. Mash the bananas to make 1 1/2 cups. Blend the mashed bananas, eggs, vanilla and buttermilk into the margarine and sugar. Mix the flour, salt and soda and add to banana mixture. Fold in the nuts. Pour the batter into a greased and floured bundt pan or a 5 by 9 inch loaf pan. Bake for 1 1/4 hours. Cool for 10 minutes. Remove from pan.
Gramma's Notes:
-Greasing and flouring the pan is very important. The bread is guaranteed to stick to the pan if you don't.
-I don't use salt in my baking. I suppose it has a purpose and someone with a culinary degree could tell me what it is but honestly, to my simple palate, baking tastes just fine without it. I figure a person gets enough salt in their regular diet that it can be eliminated from most baking and meal prep.
-We don't much care for walnuts here at our house. DD3's friend is staying with us and has braces so she can't have any nuts. So I tossed in a bag of Chipits Mini Chips. I'm not sure what the weight on the bag is. I forgot to check but it's probably about 1.5 to 2 cups.
-I've used both buttermilk and sour cream (not together) and both work fine.
-For muffins, I double the recipe and use the giant/jumbo muffin cups to make 3 1/2 dozen. I bake them at 350F for 25 - 30 minutes.
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Next up was ginger snaps.
Just look at all that spicy, crackly goodness. Naturally they're minus the obligatory 2 or 3 for quality control as well as a dozen that I sent to work with DD3 when she stopped by.
The recipe is from Company's Coming Cookies and can be found on page 111. What I love about these cookies is that they're soft. The ones I remember my mom making were hard and she and Dad would usually soften them by dipping them into their tea. As kids, we didn't care but now that I do the baking, I care...lol.
I worked on La Princesa's afghan a bit but only got 3 squares done. I'll post photos another time. Some housecleaning, laundry and work on my Spanish course (that red binder in the background) filled up the rest of my day. Oh, and some time spent on my blog list, drooling over and admiring everyone else's creations.
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