Black-Bottom Banana Bars

This is from a Taste of Home dessert cookbook which I lost to a divorce and a move. I bought the cookbook at work from a vendor who travels with his van full of books and learning tools and toys for teachers. He sets up a display in our lounge every few months with new items, leaves them for a week with order forms and an envelope for the payment, and sometimes unseen, when the display is gone, your order is bagged up with the order form attached as a receipt. It was very convenient, and there was always something useful and fun! I took advantage of it most of the time.

This recipe is one of many I made and absolutely loved. I’ve been fantasizing about it since I moved. I was able to find it through the miracle of technology since it was posted online.

There result is very much like a cake, less like a banana bread, but irresistible! Here’s what I used:

½ c butter, softened

1 c sugar

1 egg

1 t vanilla extract

1 ½ c mashed overripe bananas (usually 3 works)

1 ½ c flour

1 t baking powder

1 t baking soda

½ t salt

¼ c baking cocoa

Cream wet ingredients together. Combine dry ingredients, except cocoa, in a separate bowl. Add dry ingredients, except cocoa, to wet ingredients. Mix well without overmixing. Divide batter in half and add cocoa to one half. Pour cocoa mix into greased 9×12″ baking dish and spread to edges. Pour remaining mix on top and spread to edges. Bake at 350 F for about 35 minutes. Cool for about 10 minutes before cutting into bars. You’ll never be the same once you try these!

Black-Bottom Banana Bars

Butter and granulated sugar

Forgot to smash the bananas, so chunks in the final product.

The butter was not softened enough.

Add egg and vanilla.

Add dry to wet…

Mix until just incorporated.

Split batter and add cocoa to one half.

Spread cocoa mix to edges of 9×12″ bake pan.

Add remaining batter on top of cocoa mix and spread to edges.

Bake in preheated oven at 350F for 35 minutes.

Slice into “bars”!

So good!

Um…very dangerous! I may have already eaten this much…

Mrs. Fields Cookies

These are Oatmeal Chocolate Chip cookies with butterscotch chips added.

I usually do half of this batch and get 3 ½ to 4 dozen. Mrs. Fields cookie recipe can be found anywhere online if you search for it, and you can choose based on the format you prefer. Here are the ingredients/recipe I use:

2 c butter

2 c sugar

2 c packed brown sugar

4 eggs

2 T vanilla extract

4 c flour

5 c oatmeal, ground to make flour

1 t salt 

4 t baking powder

4 t baking soda

2 (12 oz hopefully) bags of chocolate chips

Bake at 375F for 11 minutes. Adjust according to your oven which means watch, smell, and listen. Don’t leave these alone.

The Mrs. Fields recipe also includes 8 oz Hershey Bar, grated, and 3 cups nuts, any kind (optional), but I don’t like nuts in my desserts. I also usually use a bag of mini chocolate chips and about 2 oz of whatever chocolate bar I have in the house to make 12 oz when added to the 10 oz bag of chips. So making a half-batch, that’s 12 oz total of chips. The mini chips distribute nicely and to where you get chocolate in every bite. I think that’s what makes a perfect chocolate chip cookie, besides it being soft when cooked through.

Dry ingredients

Wet ingredients

Combining dry ingredients to wet ingredients

Looking good already!

Add chips. Just let the mixer make one or two rotations. You don’t want to over mix.

You can fold it by hand to get the chips throughout, if you like.

Perfect!

I don’t have a scoop, so they are different sizes but not by much, so they cook through at about 11 minutes in my gas oven.

One to two minutes cooling on the hand before moving them to a cooling rack.hand before moving them to a cooling rack. You can see the more golden brown were left on the pan longer. Those are the crunchy batch!

Evenly distributed chips for a nice varying flavor in every bite!

Peanut Butter Cookies

These ARE the best peanut butter cookies ever! They taste great and stay soft. Unfortunately, shortening is so bad for your body; especially, if you’re diabetic, which I am not, but reading about shortening made me cringe. I wanted to see if they changed the process for making it yet again. Sadly, it has not changed. It still raises your triglycerides and lowers your good cholesterol; so I’ll just use butter and warm them up in the microwave for ten seconds to soften them up.

I used:

1 ¾ c flour

¾ t baking soda

¾ c peanut butter

½ c vegetable shortening

1¼ c packed light brown sugar

3 T soy milk

1 T vanilla extract

1 egg at room temperature

Granulated sugar (for rolling cookies), optional

 

Love this scraper tool to get all the PB out of the jar!

Traditional pattern for peanut butter cookies…

Roll in granulated sugar. Or not. I could prefer to skip this step.

Yup. I stuck my thumb in that one grabbing the pan out of the oven!

https://www.browneyedbaker.com/peanut-butter-cookies/

Iron-Rich Chocolate Balls

A friend of mine who is a vegan asked me to help her bring up her blood iron. She wasn’t sure what to eat. Low blood iron is common for new vegans, especially women, but this is not the conversation I’m trying to start, so let’s switch gears…

I found this recipe while looking for iron-rich recipe ideas and had to try it. Five ingredients. Simple. It really is. I’ve tried this a handful of times, and the most difficult part for me is pressing the mix together to make balls. It just gets tedious…or you could call it a labor of love? This is where you could bring in your muscle; in my case, it would be my son, if only he wouldn’t eat half of the mix before pressing it all into balls. So I was stuck doing it myself. Theoretically, you could line a 9×13″ bake pan with plastic wrap (or if you can find a reusable silicone liner) and press the mix firmly into the bottom of the pan, but I tried that and it didn’t work. The heat from my hands seems to be what made the sticky figs bind all the ingredients together. I probably washed my hands six times during this recipe.

I would suggest dropping a couple tablespoons into a smoothie instead of making balls or, like I did with the last bit of mix that was to dry to press, sprinkle it over split dried dates…like a date-taco. Photo at the end!

Raw ingredients. Grind to a powder as much as possible.

Add pitted dates and cocoa. Five ingredients total!

Delicious-smelling crumbly goodness!

The result! These are addicting! I ate one but sadly, I’m allergic to sesame seeds, so I froze these to share later.

Second batch a couple months later. I was so tired (and probably in need of the iron boost that I didn’t even pay attention to if the nuts and seeds were ground before I added the cocoa and dates) that I only pulsed the mix a few times in the food processor before adding the final ingredients. I saw afterward that it was pretty chunky.

Chunky goodness formed into balls.

There was quite a bit of crumbs left that would not stick together, so I made date tacos! 😉

I used this recipe; https://withextraveg.net/iron-rich-chocolate-protein-balls/

1 c cashews

1 c pumpkin seeds

1 c dates

1/4 c sesame seeds

1/4 c cocoa powder

Blueberry Shortcake

Six ingredients for pound cake. Three for compote. Three for whipped cream. Actually, seven ingredients total. The whipped cream uses the same ingredients needed for the pound cake; same as the compote, plus your favorite fruit (or use what you have).

If you want shortcuts for this shortcake, you’re in the wrong place; buy the components and assemble them. If you want the satisfaction of hard work and knowing what’s in your food. Try this recipe, or rather, these recipes. I’ve split them into three. Try one at a time if it’s too overwhelming. The pound cake one was new for me today; the other two, I’ve made before. The entire shortcake took me four hours to make (I made ravioli and sauce for dinner while the pound cake was baking). It won’t take as long now that I’ve done it and know what to expect.

Whipped Cream

1 c whipping cream

1 T sugar

1t vanilla extract

Whip to soft peaks

Blueberry Compote

2 c frozen blueberries

1/4 c sugar

1T water

Simmer at medium heat for about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Pound Cake

6 large eggs at room temperature

3 c cake flour

2 c butter, softened/room temperature

2 ½ c sugar

1/4 c whipping cream (used what I had), room temperature or as close as possible

2t vanilla extract

1 t salt

Cream sugar and butter. Add eggs slowly to make sure they are completely incorporated (I added the salt and vanilla extract to the eggs since I cracked the eggs into a separate bowl to make sure there weren’t any bad ones–just add the salt and vanilla to that, if you’re pre-measuring everything). Add the cream. Slowly add the flour until just incorporated as not to flatten/overwork the mix. Pour into buttered and floured bundt pan or two buttered and floured loaf pans. I actually used cooking spray and regular flour the first time. It still came out great! It had a nice sweet and crispy crust which I expected to soften up as it cooled but it did not! Yum…especially since I doused it in the compote and whipped cream; it did not become soggy and mushy!  Love.

Bake at 325°F for an hour to 1:15 minutes. Allow to cool for 10 minutes before turning out onto a cooling rack (or a stone surface worked out okay for me).

Holy trinity of pound cake.

Almost forgot the salt, vanilla, and cream!

Looks a lot like whipped cream…or vanilla ice cream! ;P

Ready for baking…

First time using my new bundt pan from a friend’s Pampered Chef party! Love it!

Golden brown…

Look at the rise on that thing!

Rich and creamy but not too sweet!

So beautiful…and so delicious!

 

Fruit Compote

Great for pancakes, great for cheesecake! This is so simple if you have the time. Three ingredients and 20 minutes later gives you a great topping for breakfast or dessert that stores well sealed for several days in the refrigerator. You could also serve it warm with crumbled graham crackers and whipped cream.

Blueberry is my favorite, but I prefer strawberry on my waffles with some whipped cream. The real stuff, nothing homogenized. I bought this little cheesecake from the store, I think because I had a coupon. It was plain, so I thought about what I was going to serve it with not having planned previously to get it. Blueberry Cheesecake came to mind which was my favorite ice cream in high school (I don’t remember having anything before that besides chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla; I also like Pralines and Creme, then I liked Mint Chocolate Chip, now I like Vanilla Bean with yellow cake and caramel—bad, I know!).

Start with fresh berries. Here’s some strawberries…chop them up into a pan (this was about three cups), a heaping 1/4 cup of sugar, and a teaspoon of vanilla extract.

Strawberries are full of water which they will release, enough to make a syrup.

Mix together on medium-high and cook until reduced, about 30 minutes. Let cool. Strain liquid into clean container and add sliced, fresh strawberries, if preferred.

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/ellie-krieger/blueberry-compote-recipe.html

http://allrecipes.com/recipe/43914/supreme-strawberry-topping/
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Fruit Compote

Great for pancakes, great for cheesecake! This is so simple if you have the time. Three ingredients and 20 minutes later gives you a great topping for breakfast or dessert that stores well sealed for several days in the refrigerator. You could also serve it warm with crumbled graham crackers and whipped cream.

Blueberry is my favorite, but I prefer strawberry on my waffles with some whipped cream. The real stuff, nothing homogenized. I bought this little cheesecake from the store, I think because I had a coupon. It was plain, so I thought about what I was going to serve it with not have planned previously to get it. Blueberry Cheesecake came to mind which was my favorite ice cream in high school (I don’t remember having anything before that besides chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla; I also like Pralines and Creme, then I liked Mint Chocolate Chip, now I like Vanilla Bean with yellow cake and caramel—bad, I know!).

Start with fresh berries. Here’s some strawberries…chop them up into a pan (this was about three cups), a heaping 1/4 cup of sugar, and a teaspoon of vanilla extract.

Strawberries are full of water which they will release, enough to make a syrup.

Mix together on medium-high and cook until reduced, about 30 minutes. Let cool. Strain liquid into clean container and add sliced, fresh strawberries, if preferred.

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/ellie-krieger/blueberry-compote-recipe.html

http://allrecipes.com/recipe/43914/supreme-strawberry-topping/

Mix-and-Freeze Lemon Ice Cream

Lemon Cookies, Lemon Cheesecake, Lemon Loaf…irresistible! Unfortunately, I cannot eat them anymore. Lemon Ice Cream, or at least this recipe, I can eat because I know exactly what is in it. I found it online as I have with many of my experiments, adjusted it, and now it is part of my collection. Here’s the original recipe: http://m.sunkist.com/recipes/lemon-ice-cream_33.aspx

Easy Lemon Ice Cream

The recipe calls for one cup of sugar per two cups of whipping cream. That is a lot of sugar. In an effort to minimize the “refined sugar” without sacrificing the taste, I tried ½ cup of granulated sugar and ½ cup of Truvia thinking the sugar substitute was a one-one alternative. The result was very sweet…and gritty. This suggests to me that the mix is supersaturated, all of the sugar never completely dissolves whether you whisk it longer or not; either way, I have no doubt that next time ½ cup of sugar will be just right. *I made this for my man who is also a lemon fanatic; if I have any, it has to be with a side of Lactaid!