I made food: cranberry banana bread

On Friday I decided to surprise my husband by baking something for him. Friday is his toughest day at work, and we had run out of ice cream to eat for dessert, so I knew he'd appreciate something sweet! We had two spotty brown bananas left, so of course I thought of banana bread.

I got this recipe a long time ago from a grad school colleague. It makes perfectly moist, sweet bread, and it's incredibly easy. Give it a try sometime!

Ingredients:

• 1 1/3 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 1/2 tsp. baking soda
• 1/4 tsp. baking powder
• 5 1/3 tbsp. unsalted butter
• 1/4 cup brown sugar
• 1/3 cup white sugar
• 2 eggs
• 2 very ripe bananas, mashed
• optional: 1/2 cup mix-ins, like chocolate chips, nuts, etc. I used craisins to add some tartness

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Whisk together the flour, salt, baking soda and baking powder.

In a separate bowl, cream together the butter, brown sugar and white sugar. Then beat in the dry ingredients.

Mix together the eggs, bananas and any mix-ins, then fold into the rest of the batter until just combined (you want to stir the batter as little as possible).

Butter up your loaf pan (or if, like me, you can't find your loaf pan, any bread-shaped dish) and pour in your batter. Stick it in the oven for 50-60 minutes.

While you're waiting, feel free to lick the bowl.

"Hmm, maybe if I lie down very nicely, I'll get a little batter too..."

"SCORE!!"

The bread is done when a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean. Try to resist eating it until it cools down a little!

I made food: cinnamon craisin cookies

Another day, another batch of cookies. This is another variation on Mark Bittman's butter cookie recipe; it's the same as my butterscotch cookies except I used 3/4 cup of white sugar in place of the brown sugar, and I added 1 tsp. cinnamon and 1/2 cup craisins to the batter.

These turned out softer and moister than my last batch of cookies. They're like cinnamon raisin except with more zing--the tartness of the craisins really complements the butteriness of the cookie!

It's always nice to have some cookies around the house, especially after the crazy time I had last night...but I'll tell you about that next time. ;-)

I made food: butterscotch cookies

Yesterday afternoon, my husband and I were sitting around feeling too tired to work anymore. It was that time of day when your blood sugar drops and you just feel like either eating or taking a nap. "I wish we had cookies," said Hubby. "Hey, you should make cookies."

He was basically joking, because he thought I'd never agree to it, but I surprised him by grabbing How to Cook Everything and turning to the cookie section. The first recipe there was for basic butter cookies, and I suddenly realized, hey, I have all these ingredients! One of the variations listed is for butterscotch cookies--all you have to do is use brown sugar instead of white. Less than an hour later we were eating cookies!

(That's a 100% true story, folks.)

 The recipe is very simple: you cream together a stick of butter and 2/3 cup brown sugar, then beat in an egg and 1 tsp. vanilla. In another bowl you mix 2 cups of flour, 1/2 tsp. baking powder and a pinch of salt, then mix in half the dry ingredients with the wet ingredients. Add 1/4 cup milk, beat the batter a little more, then mix in the rest of the dry ingredients. (Don't beat too much!) Put little mounds of the batter onto some baking sheets and bake at 375 degrees for 10 minutes or so. Ta-da! Cookies! (Good thing they cool quickly too, because we were getting pretty hungry.)

The cookies are soft, buttery and have an almost scone-like texture. They're also not overly sweet (I've noticed this with other dessert recipes in this cookbook). If you like sweeter cookies, you could increase the amount of sugar, or just drizzle some honey over them like I did!