Baking: BANANA BREAD

Guys I found a cool recipe! It is ONE BANANA BANANA BREAD! I found it HERE. I've made it twice so far (two loaves each time) and it is fool-proof and has few ingredients and tastes like banana.

Okay, so basically you get all the ingredients and dump them all in a big bowl. I doubled the recipe but here's 1x:

1 egg

Milk until egg+milk = 1 cup (I used almond milk here! yum!)

0.5 cup butter

1.5 cups flour

1 cup white sugar

1 tsp baking soda

1 tsp vanilla extract

and of course, one banana!

Everything in the bowl! I mixed it by hand and it didn't take long though you can totally use a mixer (those things scare me though, I avoid them at all costs). Mix it until most of the lumps are gone, but not too much or it'll be too dense.

Fill the loaf pans two-thirds full!

Preheat oven to 350 degrees and bake for 55 minutes.

The toothpick test was the perfect check. Breakfast is served!

It was pretty much gone the second it came out of the oven so no pics of the sliced up pieces. Yum! Let me know if you try this. Do you have any favourite recipes?

Baking: Chocolate peanut butter chip cookies!

Pre-post reminder: Google reader is shutting down Monday and I'd hate to lose you! Please move to bloglovin (it's really easy when you sign up) or use RSS or something <3

D: Oh my gawd guys, I ate like half this batch of cookies on my own. They were SO GOOD. Didn't last the night. We used the recipe on the Hershey's website HERE. It made 48 cookies. The site says 54, but what the hell kind of number is that?

And then there were none.

They were amazing.

Baking! Cheese and garlic scones

So I have the best boyfriend ever. I walked over to his house the other day and he was just pulling one of my favourite things out of the oven: Cheese and Garlic Scones! Sorry, ladies, he's taken.

So the recipes he used are on the internets, and it's actually really easy =D I'm just gonna leave you the links I think.

Cheese-garlic scone recipe
Self-rising flour recipe

Obviously instead of large cakes and wedges Branden opted for lumps. =3

Now these are quite garlicky, and might not be for everybody. They actually last in Branden's house because half his family thinks they're TOO garlicky :D Happy Day!

If you try these, let me know what you think!

BAKING: Angelfood confetti cupcakes with Strawberry Whip Icing

First, I'd like to say I found the first bug in the watermark program: it doesn't mark my non-nail pics! IT KNOWS SOMEHOW! *cough* Anyway, the boy will get to this ASAP as I will pester him.

Okay, to post. It was my friend's kids' birthday party(ies?) and being socialized little girls, their favourite colour is PINK. Last year we made fantastic angelfood cake cupcakes with strawberry buttercream icing but hey, this year we have Gramma's vanilla whip icing which means we get to experiment! We were a little leery since the chocolating of the recipe didn't turn out nicely, but this isn't a dry ingredient so we dove right in after a bit of thought!

This was lots of fun. We modified the recipe a bit to avoid adding lots of fluid via pureed strawberries. So from before the original recipe was:

Here's what you'll need:
5TBSP Flour
1CUP Milk
1CUP Butter
1CUP White Sugar
1TSP Vanilla

We modified this by using only half the milk (0.5CUP Milk) and adding 0.75CUP pureed strawberries. Our first step came out MUCH more dense and gluey which was to expected.

(Full instructions for this recipe here - nothing was changed, only ingredient measures as noted above)

Cupcakes were made with Betty Crocker Angelfood confetti cake.

Angelfood cake cupcakes!

 I forgot how marshmallow-y they are pre-baking! Teehee~ They poofled up nicely =)

I didn't get a photo of our lumpy glue paste but it was extremely relieving when we added the strawberries and the icing whipped up just like there were none! These next two pics is where I try to show you the pretty pink it became but alas, kitchen lighting was not my friend.

That's okay though, because you can see it in the next photo!

This icing is PERFECT for piping! Lookit my pretty lines =D If I'd had the patience I would have flowered the whole thing xD As it were, Branden covered up the middle with chopped strawberries, which is where the rest of our $3.98 package went. I think they worked out quite nicely!

These tasted absolutely amazing! You guys need to try this icing recipe and it's extremely pliable! Tell me what you put in it! Better yet, tell me what I should put in it! I'm already thinking of redoing my mango-coconut devilfood cupcakes with this icing instead of buttercream. What do you think?

Baking: Cupcakes with Vanilla Whip Icing

Hello again everyone! I have a sweet treat for you today! This is a recipe from Branden's Gramma for Vanilla Icing that is a little bit whipped cream like, and a little bit ice cream like. It is FANTASTIC, to say the least, and versatile.

Here's what you'll need:
5TBSP Flour
1CUP Milk
1CUP Butter
1CUP White Sugar
1TSP Vanilla

(Notice: NO Icing sugar involved!)

Alright, now for instructions...

1. Cook flour and milk until thick (approximately 6 minutes)

This is what it becomes. It looks like PASTE. Gross =P You have to let it cool until it's cold!
3. Cream together sugar and butter and vanilla, add it to the flour mixture and then BEAT IT TO ALL HELL - until it's creamy.

It will stand up like whipped cream when it's done, but until then it will look rather curdly. You can add chocolate (we found a 1/3CUP works well.

It makes quite a bit too! Enough for a full layer cake icing, sides and filling, or 24 well iced cupcakes ;)

Take a look!

Vanilla icing on Betty Crocker devil's food cake

With sprinkles!

=D They went pretty fast!

That last picture has the Betty Crocker's devil's food cake with vanilla icing and Betty Crocker French vanilla with vanilla icing (+1/3CUP Cocoa to make it chocolate)! It turned out nice! For whatever reason the chocolate one was lumpy even before we added the chocolate but they were still delicious. And rainbow sprinkles =D

You guys should try this recipe and let me know how it worked out for you! You know it'll be good, it's a GRAMMA RECIPE!

Baking time: Special K Treats

Contrary to the name of the post, this is not about drugs. Special K is a cereal brand and most of the iterations are DELICIOUS. Recently Branden's brother came home with a little card with a recipe and whipped some up and today I paid it back and made another batch. It literally takes ten minutes.

 There's the little card with the recipe. He got it from one of his coworkers =)

For ease I transcribed the photo:
2 and a quarter cups of Special K (the CEREAL)
Half cup smooth peanut butter
1 package of chocolate chips (equivalent to about 2 cups)

Melt peanut butter and chocolate chips together (low heat). When all melted, remove from heat. Stir in Special K. Drop by teaspoon onto waxed paper-lined cookie sheet.

This recipe works well with all flavours of chocolate chips - milk, semi sweet, butterscotch, etc

This is after the dropping onto cookie sheet. The best part is cleaning out the pan you use. I recommend using a rubber spatula to mix, so that the chocolate chips don't end up burning at the bottom. Keep it moving or it'll get too hot! It only takes about five minutes to be melted and another minute or two to get rid of all the lumps. Hurt my arm though, I need more push ups!

After dropping, stick them in the fridge to harden them up real quick...

I eat these SO FAST it's disgusting. They taste SO good. I apparently really like chocolate and peanut butter. Reese lied in their commercials, it's exactly the same.

Try it and tell me how you like them! If you use a different cereal, let me know what works! The Special K I used was basically Rice Krispies so try those too =D

What are your favourite easy treats to make? Tell me in the comments! <3

Movember!

Welp, we're nearing the end of November (which means I get to do tons of Christmas themed nail art soon - SO EXCITED) but let's end off on topic here. Using that base of Julep Hayden, I used my Sharpie and LA Colors black striper to draw on some mo's ;)

I didn't quite wait long enough before starting to draw them on, so they're a little messed up. Oh well!

First my right hand...

And then my left, which still turns out better somehow even though I'm left-handed. The ring finger is a shout out to all those guys who couldn't grow one if they tried ;) *COUGH-myboyfriend-COUGH*

I thought it was a cute idea =P How about you? Overdone? Would you have stuck to one style of 'stache?

PS: Red Velvet cupcakes and jello shooters are pretty awesome.

Cream-cheese icing ftw

Omnomnomnom cupcakes

So these were sorta for my birthday but really just because... (We baked twice)

Here's how we started.

Key Lime Cream Cheese Icing with food colouring (3 drops green, 1 drop blue)

 Without the food colouring it just looked like glue, and even in the pic above, didn't really show up well.

Here you can see the green better.

One week later...

Vanilla Buttercream icing with chocolate sprinkly things and blueberries and raspberries

 These ones were amazing.

I'm not sure which I liked better...

The second ones look more birthday-ish, but the key lime icing is very summery and refreshing.

Mmmm cupcakes! =D

Thank you cupcakes!!

So as you may be aware, on Friday I kicked a rogue tiger in the face and/or single-handedly wrestled the snakehead out of Burnaby Lake and had to get six stitches (Read: I got hit by a door on the way out). I will spare you the ugly heel shot for now, but basically I had three people willing to hold my hand for 3.5 hours.

That calls for thank-you-for-not-leaving-me-alone-to-die cupcakes of course!

We found this recipe and I brought over a big fat delicious mango from home to get started. The recipe is kind of open-ended, but I recommend adding butter to thicken it, not icing sugar, as the sugar overpowers the delicious mango-pango goodness.

Mango puree~ NOMS

You add the mango and taste test - ours was really light and fluffy thanks to the butter, and the mango flavour just made you crave more. Mmmm.



SO ANYWAY.

Devil's Food cake mix!

Branden's mom also had coconut bits lying around, so we iced some cupcakes and dipped them in and VIOLA:

Mmmmmmm!

Artistic shot ;)

Leftover puree? ICE CREAMY GOODNESS.

They are freaking delicious, mang. My people (Moein, Ronak, Spencer, Maria) will love them, and hopefully know how much I appreciated how they took care of me =)

I wanted to do a fabulous food post

but my I used my camera not my blackberry and forgot the cord today. Sad.

Instead, have some cookies.

We made ~90 cookies.

The last batch is in the oven. Maybe this is why the gym every day isn't helping....

Happy Birthday Robyn Baking!

Aquarium themed cupcakes! We found Swedish Fish, Blue Whales and Peach Penguins xD And Frogs, because I fucking love Frogs (the candy). Good ol' Betty Crocker!