This stuff is bananas

It’s been longer while since posting than I thought it had been.

I’ve been baking still, of course.

And that’s that.

Back to the baking.

I saw a package of very ripe bananas in the reduced produce section at a supermarket the other day.

I bought the bananas.

Ripe bananas are ideal for banana bread.

I usually store ripe bananas in the freezer until I’m ready to use them.

But there wasn’t any room in the freezer.

No problem: I had an idea.

Banana salted vanilla caramel rolls.

Here they are before getting the caramel topping:

And again:

And after getting the caramel topping:

And again:

Again, that’s banana salted vanilla caramel rolls.

The main ingredient of note is banana.

The bread dough itself had a banana in it. The filling had a banana in it. And I made a salted banana-vanilla caramel – with two bananas in it – as a topping.

For the dough, I used this basic recipe for bread machine sweet dough. That’s right, I used a bread machine dough cycle to make the dough. I added the aforementioned banana and a small amount of instant coffee. I also added about a cup or so of extra flour – I eyeballed it – to account for the extra liquid from the banana. I also used a few tablespoons of aquafaba instead of the cornstarch-water-baking powder combination in the linked post.

I’ll have to consider a post about aquafaba at some point…fascinating stuff.

Anyway.

The filling was a mashed up banana, about half a cup of brown sugar, a packet of vanilla sugar, and some salt.

The caramel, which I added after baking and cooling, was kind of a random idea based on previous experience making a caramel-like filling for pecan pie.

For the caramel, I mashed two bananas into a smooth paste in a cooking pot, then added some sugar, salt, and vanilla sugar. I put the heat on low and cooked and stirred and cooked and stirred some more until the caramel was the right consistency. The right consistency was a when-you-know-it-you-know-it decision.

I let both the rolls themselves and the caramel cool overnight.

This is what the caramel looked like just before being spread on the rolls:

I just realized that there is batter splatter on my The Baking board in the photo. Said splatter has since been cleaned.

The banana caramel was the most experimental part of this recipe and also the part I’m most pleased with. Definitely a win.

Anyway, here’s the finished product one more time:

This recipe was the product of some imagination and a total of four bananas and it was absolutely delicious.

Absolutely bananas.

And for more banana bread content, check out some previous bakes:

Banana bread cake cones.

Experiments in banana bread.

Chocolate-chocolate chip bananana muffins.

Banana-blueberry muffins.

Bon appetit.

Cheesecake reappears

Cheesecake reappears.

And a new The Baking post.

Many cheesecakes – using variations on the recipe from this post – have been happening.

I like the recipe quite a lot as I find it easy to experiment with.

Flavours can be played with and switched up, as long as the ratio of liquids to solids is maintained.

I’ve tried replacing some of the soy milk with lime juice.

And I’ve tried replacing cocoa and some of the soy milk with pureed strawberries.

Both attempts resulted in delicious cheesecake. So delicious that pictures didn’t happen.

Cue the sad trombone.

Anyway.

I’ve also tried graham crust instead of Oreo crust.

I’ m thinking that a cookie crust – in the form of cookie dough pre-baked in a springform pan – might be the next experiment.

A versatile recipe, with simple ingredients, that’s easy to modify is a good recipe to have around.

And now for something not-at-all completely different: pictures of some of the cheesecakes.

The cake in the picture below had to be one of the best-looking cheesecakes that I baked:

This was a vanilla cheesecake with Oreo crumb crust.

When I took the side piece off of the springform pan after this cake had cooled and chilled, I somewhat couldn’t even.

The cake was quite the aesthetically-pleasing cake.

The batter met up with the crust in just the right way.

And the cake was delicious.

The cake appearing below was a pumpkin cheesecake in the form of a pie:

Here’s a close-up of the cut cake-pie.

I replaced some of the soy milk and some of the oil with plain canned pumpkin. And added a bit of cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and ginger.

The crust was an Oreo crust. And I baked the pie-cake in a glass pie dish.

The main thing was to adjust the cooking time as the pie was thinner and had less volume than the cheesecake I usually bake in my springform pan. I checked on the pie a few times and took it out of the oven once it looked set.

And there it is: cheesecake.

Again.

And a new The Baking post.

Bon appetit.

Oatmeal cookies

It had been a while since I’d had a nice oatmeal cookie.

So I made a batch of oatmeal cookies with chocolate chips.

And they were absolutely fabulous:

I used, as per usual, my basic cookie ingredients process.

To modify the dough to make oatmeal cookies, I added extra liquid – about one quarter of a cup total – and about thee quarters of a cup of oatmeal.

I used plain, quick-cook oats. Large-flake oats would probably work too, albeit with a slightly different final texture.

I also added a pinch or two each of cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves. The idea with the spice was for a light trace of spice in the cookies, not full-on spice flavour.

I used about half a cup of chocolate chips.

I like relatively crisp cookies, so I made these cookies thin and baked them a little longer than I would have if I wanted them to be soft.

Yep.

[Everyone] heart[s] cookies

I made cookies. 

The cookies were shaped like hearts.

Here they are:

I used my usual cookie formula, with a few modifications.

But I didn’t use a cookie cutter to make the heart shapes.

Really.

Look carefully at the cookie in the centre of the picture. You might be able to see small seam-like lines that give away how the heart shape was made. I took three round pieces of cookie dough, flattened them into regular, round-ish shapes, and then shaped and pushed the pieces together into a heart-like shape. I used the edge of a butter knife to straighten out some of the edges.

As for the modifications to the cookie formula, I added about a teaspoon or so of cocoa powder to the dough, and used about a quarter of a cup each of chocolate chips and chopped hazelnuts. I used cold coffee as the main liquid ingredient.

I added the cinnamon hearts and heart-shape gummies – both from a bulk food store – as the cookies were cooling on a wire rack after baking. I used the still-melted chocolate chips as a sort of glue and pressed the cinnamon hearts and gummies into exposed chocolate chips. Once the chocolate had cooled and hardened, the cinnamon hearts and gummies stuck.

 

Memories of cheesecake

Ok, so maybe the reference – it’s in the post title, and, if you get it, you get it – is kind of cheesy, but this cheesecake-like creation actually contains no cheese at all.

And cue the drum noise for the wordplay.

Anyway, even though the cheesecake featured in this post contained zero per cent cheese, I’m going to refer to it as a cheesecake, for ease of typing and writing and so on.

Shortly after acquiring a springform pan, I put said pan to use making a chocolate and vanilla swirl cheesecake. Actually, to be more accurate, I made a chocolate-coffee and vanilla-coffee marble cheesecake with an Oreo cookie crumbs crust.

The cheesecake was delicious.

And a slice of the finished product looked like this:

And, from another angle, this:

 

For the recipe, I used this recipe as a base/guideline, and modified things to suit what I wanted, what ingredients I felt like using, and what I thought would work better.

My version of the recipe:

-For the crust, I used Oreo baking crumbs. You can buy Oreo baking crumbs from the grocery store in a box or you can buy them in bulk from bulk food stores. I used the crust recipe on the on the Oreo baking crumbs box, which calls for mixing  1 1/4 of a cup of the baking crumbs with 1/4 of a cup of margarine. I used room-temperature Earth Balance margarine. Once the crumbs and the margarine are mixed, pour the mixture into an assembled/put together springform pan and spread and press the mixture evenly along the bottom and sides of the pan. At this stage, you can either move the pan to the side until the filling is ready OR you can bake the crust for a few minutes. I prefer a baked crust: it turns out crispier and, in my opinion, much more delicious. If you decide to bake the crust, pre-heat the oven to 325 degrees and bake the crust for about 5 or so minutes before removing it.

-Before starting on the filling, pre-heat the oven to 325 degrees, if it’s not already pre-heated from baking the crust.

Next, start making the filling.

For the filling, I mixed the following ingredients all together in a bowl:

– crumbled FIRM tofu. I took the time to try and translate this amount of tofu called for in the recipe into more-easily-understood fractions-of-the-kind-of-tofu-block-that-I-usually-buy-terms. Using the size of the tofu blocks usually sold in the cold section of the grocery store, this works out, in my estimate, to just over 1 and 1/2 blocks of firm tofu. The calculations aren’t exact, but I’ve successfully made two of these cheesecakes so far using my calculated amount of tofu. You may need to do your own calculations if you’re using smaller or larger tofu blocks. Drain excess liquid from the tofu before you use it. And crumble or mash the tofu once it’s in the bowl.

-1 1/2 cups sugar. I used regular, fine-grind, white sugar

-1/4 cup canola oil

-1/2 cup soy milk. You could use almond milk or rice milk, or, really, pretty much whatever edible liquid matter – such as, say, water – that you wanted.

-1/4 cup cold coffee. The recipe called for rum. I didn’t have rum. Coffee worked. Rum would probably work too.

-1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract.

Mix everything together. I used an immersion blender. You could probably use a regular blender or, in a pinch, you could use a masher or egg beater or some combination of random mixing tools. I think, though, that using an immersion blender would result in the best and smoothest texture for the filling.

Blend until the  the mixture is smooth, free of random lumps and chunks, and somewhat custard-like in texture and consistency. If you’re using an immersion blender, achieving the custard-like texture and consistency will take several minutes and several stops to scrape the sides and bottom of the bowl with a spatula.

Once the mixture is blended, pour about half of it into another bowl and add about 4 tablespoons of cocoa powder. Blend the coca into the mixture.

Now it’s time to start pouring the cheesecake filling mixture into the already-prepared crust in the springform pan.

To achieve the chocolate and vanilla marbled effect:

-you could either pour alternate blobs of filling from the vanilla and from the chocolate filling bowls into the pan – starting with an initial layer that completely covers the bottom of the pan – until both bowls are empty.

-OR you could pour random, alternate, amounts of whichever filling you want into the pan until both bowls are empty.

I used the first method, and then, I took a clean bamboo kebab skewer and – being careful not to touch or move around the crust on the bottom or the sides of the pan – swirled it around a bit.

To bake, carefully transfer the filled springform pan into the, preheated, oven – you may want to put the pan on a cookie sheet to protect the bottom of your oven from any leaks – and bake it at 325 degrees for about one hour and fifteen minutes.

Yes, really, one hour and fifteen minutes.

The cheesecake will almost certainly not look like it’s done after one hour and fifteen minutes. A ready-to-come-out-of-the-oven cheesecake should look ever-so-slightly more solid and set and less custard-like. Check on the cheesecake – ideally through the oven door window – during cooking to make sure that all is well and over-cooking isn’t happening.

When the cheesecake is judged ready to come out of the oven – or it’s been one hour and fifteen minutes – remove the pan from the oven and transfer it to a wire rack to cool.

Leave the pan to cool on the wire rack until the pan and its contents have cooled down to room temperature.

Next, transfer the room-temperature pan to the fridge to cool further. It’s probably best to leave the cheesecake in the fridge to cool overnight. And it’s probably NOT a particularly good idea to try to take the side piece off of the springform pan before the cake has had a chance to cool in the fridge overnight.

Once the cake is cooled, carefully remove the side piece of the springform pan. You may want to run a thin wooden or rubber spatula between the edge of the pan and the cheesecake crust before attempting to remove the side piece.

A few assorted tips:

-Don’t use silken tofu. Use firm tofu. Really.

-The cheesecake needs a long time to cool.

-If you poke or prod at the cheesecake while it’s cooling, you’ll probably either make a mess or leave marks on the cheesecake. Refrain, if you can.

All who tasted this cheesecake reported that it was delicious.

So, bon appetit and such.

 

Cookies for the holidays

There was, I believe, a rather-a-big-deal holiday that happened in December.

So, I baked stuff.

Mostly, I baked cookies. For all of the cookies that I made,  I used my basic cookie formula as the base of the cookie dough and modified the ingredients as I saw fit.

The first cookies were chocolate chip with chopped hazelnuts. I used cold coffee as the liquid. And I added about half a cup of chopped hazelnuts and one third of cup of semi-sweet chocolate chips to the finished dough. Before baking the cookies, I pressed holiday-theme sugar decorations into the dough. The result? This:

Next up, salted double-chocolate cookies.  Again, I used the basic cookie formula with cold coffee as the liquid. I also added slightly more salt to the dough base than I usually would. And about three tablespoons of cocoa powder. Then, about half a cup of semi-sweet chocolate chips. The result? A tasty, salted, chocolate-chocolate chip goodness, with edible silver-colour decorations that I added before baking:

And, for the finale, I took some dough set aside from both of the batches already pictured and – using the procedure I wrote about here – made cookie pops.

These are the chocolate chip and hazelnut cookies in cookie pop form:

These – using a different kind of edible silver-colour decoration – are the salted double chocolate cookies in cookie pop form:

 

And here’s a [gratuitous?] extra shot of a bunch of cookies and cookie pops cooling:

All of the decorations that I used for these cookies were from a bulk food store.

 

 

 

 

Strong coffee – in cookie form

These cookies had a lot of coffee – so much coffee, in fact, that you can see little grains of coffee in this post-baking close-up:

The recipe was, of course, a slightly modified version of my basic cookie procedure.

The modifications?

More liquid.

And a lot of fine-grind coffee.

No, really, it was a lot of coffee.

I added about 1/3 of a cup total of very fine-grind dark coffee directly into the cookie dough.

And I used cold, brewed coffee as the liquid.

I also added about 1 tablespoon of cocoa powder to the dough – and used a pinch or two more salt than I would usually use.

The finished cookies had a nice crunchy-on-the-outside-and-soft-on-the-inside texture. And they REALLY tasted like coffee.

The coffee taste was strong enough that these cookies weren’t quite to everyone’s taste, but it seemed that the people who did like the cookies seemed to really, really like them. The cookies didn’t last long.

 

 

Remember those convenience-store cupcakes?

These cupcakes are a nod to a certain brand of packaged cupcakes often found in convenience stores.

These cupcakes likely  have a shorter shelf life than the packaged version. But they were consumed rapidly enough that shelf life really wasn’t much of an issue.

I used the same moist, dense, and choclate-y chocolate cake batter recipe that I used for this cake and these other cupcakes. For the icing filling and top-of-cupcake decoration, I used the icing recipe that I used for this cake.

I baked the cupcakes the day before filling and decorating them. Cake tends to be crumbly when it’s super-fresh – or not fully cooled – and I wanted to be able to make holes in the centres of the cupcakes without destroying the cupcakes

Holes in the centres of the cupcakes – each of which was filled with about a tablespoon of icing – were made with this lovely cupcake-corer device:

Here’s another view of the corer beside a just-filled-with-icing cupcake:

The pieces of cupcake that were cored out were squished back into place on top of the filling.

Then, each cupcake was covered with a few spoonfuls of chocolate ganache.

For the chocolate ganache topping, I used a modified version of a recipe from a cupcake recipe book I have. I used:

-1 1/4 cup soy milk – you could substitute another milk-like beverage if you’d like

-1 package semi-sweet chocolate chips

-2 tablespoons brown sugar

Mix the milk beverage and the brown sugar together in a pot and bring to a boil. As soon as the liquid starts boiling, remove the pot from the heat source. Add the chocolate chips to the mixture immediately and stir – with a heat-safe spatula – until thoroughly blended. Let the mixture cool away from the heat source.

The ganache topping should remain relatively liquid and easy to spread for quite some time as it cools. The texture and thickness will likely be somewhat pudding-like. It should eventually cool and solidify to a, well, chocolate ganache-like state that is more solid.

Once the cupcakes had been topped with ganache – and the ganache had slightly cooled – I loaded up my icing gun with the same icing that used for the cupcake filling. I used a small, round opening, icing tip to make a loop-y line across the top of each cupcake.

And that’s that.

Peanut butter-filled chocolate cookies

I made these chocolate cookies with salted peanut butter filling as an experiment.

They were delicious – and also rather large, so I only ended up eating one of them.

Here’s an outside view:

On the inside, the cookies looked like this:

I put two bits of peanut butter filling – which was basically just regular chunky peanut-only peanut butter with a bit of salt and icing sugar added – into each cookie.

For each cookie, I took a large piece of the outside dough, flattened it, and then gently shaped it around the pieces of the peanut butter mixture.

The outside, chocolate, dough was the good old basic cookie procedure – but with a bit of cocoa powder and extra liquid added. The extra liquid made for a dough that baked to a softer, somewhat cake-like, final product.

I also baked some of the cookies with bits of the peanut butter mixture on the outside as well as the inside. The peanut butter mixture was rather crumbly, so it was easy to roll the cookies in a bit of the mixture before baking.  The peanut-butter-on-the-outside cookies looked like this:

 

Salted double chocolate cookies

These cookies were a hit.

So much of a hit, in fact, that one of the people who tried the cookies took the rest of the cookies home with them – and then took the cookies on with them vacation.

And here are the cookies:

These cookies are – yet again – another take on my basic cookie formula/recipe.

What’s different?

I added about two tablespoons of cocoa powder along with the sugar. I also added an extra tablespoon of liquid vanilla extract. And about an extra half teaspoon of salt. Adjust the amounts of cocoa powder, vanilla, and sugar to your taste.

You might also want to let the wet ingredients – the oil, liquid, vanilla, sugar, et cetera – sit together in a covered bowl in the fridge overnight. Letting the ingredients sit in the fridge overnight helps the flavours in the cookie dough mix together. Or, at least, that’s what I think.

When it came time to add the chocolate chips, I added about two thirds of a cup total of mixed large and small semi-sweet chocolate chips.

Chocolate just seems to work with salt.