Posts Tagged ‘banana’

Banana Chocolate Milkshake

Posted: 11th June 2013 by doomthings in Dessert, Drink, Snack, The Foodening
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This is a milkshake without added sugar.  Yeah, yeah, bananas are lots of sugar, but the key here is no added sugar.

Behold:

  1. Make one (or two) servings of banana chocolate ice cream with desired add-ins.
  2. Transfer to blender (or continue in food processor) and add small amounts of milk between blending.
  3. Continue until you reach the desired consistency.
  4. Transfer to glass and put in fridge for 10 – 20 minutes.  The longer you leave it, the more it will have a milkshake consistency.
I feel like making chalk drawings on the sidewalk. And like I'm 5.

I feel like making chalk drawings on the sidewalk. And like I’m 5.

Avocado Banana Bread

Posted: 4th May 2013 by doomthings in Snack, The Foodening
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So, another banana bread post.  Yay!  I actually made this one first, but wasn’t sure I wanted to post it because it was good, but not as good as regular banana bread or the chocolate chip banana bread.  Don’t get me wrong, I still thought it was good, it was just more crumbly and more cake-like than moist bread-like.  I think this is because I swapped the butter for avocado one-to-one and avocado doesn’t melt like butter.  Another big change is that I omitted sugar entirely.  I found, in multiple places, that people had omitted sugar because they used  super-ripe bananas, which are already pretty sweet.

If I make this again, I probably add sugar.  The original recipe called for 1 cup of white sugar, but I would start with 1/2 cup of dark brown sugar (my favorite kind of sugar; I substitute this in lots of my baking because I love the molasses taste it adds).  To make the texture more moist, I would probably add another banana (the original recipe calls for 5, yes, 5!  I think that makes it way too banana-y, but it’s really your preference.).  Despite these changes, I still thought it was really yummy!  Go forth and bake!!

Ingredients:

  • 2 cups bread flour
  • 1 1/2 tsp baking powder
  • 1/2 tsp baking soda
  • 1/4 tsp salt
  • 1/4 tsp ground cinnamon
  • 1/8 tsp ground nutmeg
  • 2 eggs
  • 1 banana, mashed
  • 1 avocado

Directions:

  1. In a large bowl, combine flour, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, nutmeg and salt.
  2. In a medium bowl, beat eggs, bananas, and avocado.
  3. Add egg mixture to flour mixture and stir until just combined.
  4. Pour batter into a greased and floured bread pan (or any smallish pan!).
  5. Bake at 350 degrees F for 55 – 60 minutes, or until it passes the toothpick test*.

*Toothpick test:  Insert a wooden toothpick in the middle of the bread.  If it comes out clean, the bread is probably ready.  If it comes out with batter, keep on cookin’!


Fruits!
GOOO!
Ready to bake!
Finished!

FAIL: Oatmeal Banana Cookies

Posted: 14th April 2013 by doomthings in Dessert, FAIL, The Foodening
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This is the first FAIL post.  There will be more.  Sometimes things seem like a good idea and turn out horrible.  Normally, I like to credit the blogs and websites where I find recipes to mangle and change to suit my foodening moods.  For FAIL posts, however, those sources should be protected and so will not be credited.  Who wants to find out that someone doesn’t like their recipes.  No one!  That said, if one of my recipe-regurgitations fails for you, I want to know!!!  Sometimes fails are necessary!

Getting back on track, I thought this was going to be a rockin’ recipe.  It only uses two ingredients!  Bananas and quick-oats.  I have both of those on hand all the time so I thought it would be a fun replacement for cookies.  Who doesn’t want to eat cookies for every meal?  This recipe basically insured that I could have a cookie whenever I want!

“Hey!  You can’t eat cookies for lunch!”

“Oh, NO???  Bananas and oatmeal, WHAT!”

Yeah, that fantasy died with my first taste of the most spongy, squishy cookie ever.  I do have to say that the taste seemed OK although my hoosband didn’t really like how strong the banana was.  It’s possible they could have stayed in the oven for a bit longer, but then the outsides would have been crispy and burned.  Ew.

Here’s the recipe for those of you who want to try it.  I really want this to work.  Let us know if you tried it, what you changed, and if it turned out well!

Ingredients:

  • 2 super-ripe bananas
  • 1 1/4 cup quick-oats
  • splash of vanilla (optional)
  • chocolate chips (optional)
  • craisins (optional)

Directions:

  1. Mix bananas and oatmeal well.
  2. Include optional add-ins if desired.
  3. Drop by teaspoonfuls onto greased/parchment-papered baking sheet
  4. Bake for 15 – 20 minutes at 350 degrees F, or until golden (if you can tell).

This is what mine looked like.


Too much spongy!

Banana Ice Cream Gets Better…

Posted: 3rd April 2013 by doomthings in Dessert, The Foodening
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I’ve updated the Banana Ice Cream post to include the following amazing discovery.  If you’ve already discovered this, I’m just a little slow…

Out of laziness, being full, and forgetfullness, I did two things:  1) I left my chopped up banana in the freezer for over a week.  2) When I finally made the banana ice cream, I left that in the freezer for over a week.

You can guess how number one was resolved.  I took it out of the freezer, let it sit about 10 minutes and made my ice cream.  I tasted it, and it worked just fine.  Horray!  I was actually pretty full, so I put the newly created dessert into a sealed container and put it back in the freezer.  About 9 days later, I remembered it was in there and pulled it out.  It was pretty frozen, so I left it sitting on my counter for a while.  I honestly can’t remember how long, but I would guess anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour.  By the time I sat down to devour it, I found that it actually had the texture of something between frozen yogurt and ice cream!  When I made it the first time, it was definitely on the other side of frozen yogurt, away from ice cream, as far as texture was concerned.  That was definitely not a bad thing, but this “new” texture made it taste and feel more like chocolate ice cream than just creamed banana with chocolate in it.  I highly recommend this strategy.  It takes a little more planning, particularly if you have more than one mouth to feed, but it’s worth it.  It is worth nothing that all my banana ice cream trials have been single serving.  If you were to say, make multiple servings, I would put them in single serving containers before freezing so they thaw faster when pulling them out for a treat.

Texture is almost just like ice cream.

Texture is almost just like ice cream.

Banana Ice Cream

Posted: 20th March 2013 by doomthings in Dessert, The Foodening
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The original post for this recipe from Use Real Butter (which I found via Pinterest) titled it “single ingredient ice cream”, but really it’s banana ice cream with various flavorings.  So, it’s not reaaaally a single ingredient recipe (which she did admit in her post).

We don’t buy ice cream anymore because the good stuff is full of sugar and fat and we’d rather keep that at a minimum.  Considering my other baking experiments, it’s probably a good thing that we don’t have ice cream on hand to add to the internal chaos that comes with deliciously unhealthy foods.  I was originally very skeptical about this recipe because it sounded too good to be true, but I just decided to go for it.

Ingredients (is seems silly to list these at this point):

  • 4 bananas, just slightly overripe (brown spots good, completely black not so good)
  • 2 tbsp creamy peanut butter (optional – thus 2 ingredient ice cream)
  • 2 tsp cocoa powder (optional – thus 2 or 3 ingredient ice cream depending on peanut butter)

Directions:

Note: Don’t freeze the banana whole.  That could seriously mess up your food processor.

  1. Peel the bananas and slice them up into 1/4 to 1/2 inch thick disks.
  2. Place the banana slices in the freezer for about an hour or until they are frozen solid.  Overnight works nicely.
  3. Put the frozen slices in a food processor and process the crap out of us.
  4. First they will start to resemble gravel, but keep going because it will soon turn into a frozen mush.
  5. When the bananas look like whipped ice cream, add your preferred flavor!
  6. Makes about pint.

This turned out great!  I used just one banana (I wanted chocolate and my husband wanted peanut butter) and it turned out to be a perfect single-serving!  I was slightly worried after the “gravel” stage, because my food processor started to strain and got really hot.  I did have to stop a couple of times to smoosh the banana down so the blades could continue their work.  It very suddenly turned from gravel to mush.  It was like a step function (sorry, I’m an engineer; that’s engineer speak for “one second it was gravel, the next it was mush”).  It was cool to watch.  Then I added an absurd amount of chocolate cocoa powder.  YUM.

I really liked that I did not need to add sugar.  I had a chocolate banana.  Delicious.  My husband really liked his peanut butter version (no sugar added as well) and we didn’t feel like we had just eaten ice cream.  It was excellent.  I will probably make these tonight.  Again.

 [UPDATE Apr.04.13 – You can freeze the chopped up banana for up to a week (probably longer).  You can also freeze the ice cream once it’s made.  I left it in the freezer for over a week, and after letting it thaw for about 30 minutes, it had a texture very similar to ice cream, better than just eating it right away.  See this Update Post for details!].