Chunky Monkey Cookies

I've spent the last month snooping around inside the blog Baking and Creating with Avril, that being my assigned blog for Secret Recipe Club this month.  As the title of her blog might suggest, Avril likes to bake, so there was no shortage of sweet treats here to tempt my taste buds, along with a healthy serving of family friendly savoury dishes as well.  In the end, since I still had some chocolate and (now very ripe) Fair Trade bananas on hand from this hamper I told you about a couple of weeks ago, it was Avril's Chunky Monkey Oatmeal Cookies that won me over.

There are a few things I learned from making these cookies, most of which in fact has nothing to do with cookies.  Firstly, I really should not get out of bed before 10.00 am on a Sunday morning.  Secondly, if I must be so foolish as to rise before midday, I should not operate heavy and potentially dangerous machinery before I've at least had breakfast!!

Long story cut short ... we were headed out for lunch today, so I decided to get up earlier than usual and make these cookies before going out;  I also decided, somewhat foolishly, to skip breakfast.  In the interests of haste, because I am not one of those women who can get dressed and ready and out the door in half an hour flat, I decided to shortcut things a little and use the food processor to cream the butter and sugar for the cookies.  "Nek minnit" as we say in New Zealand, two inch gash across the palm of my hand and me hollering for the medic as if I was a contestant on Masterchef.

Anyway, hoping that I haven't completely skeeved you out by now, back to the cookies.

I made very few changes to Avril's recipe, which she in turn adapted from a Martha Stewart Recipe.  When I think Chunky Monkey, I think bananas, chocolate, and peanut butter, so I swapped out pecans for some roasted, unsalted peanuts.  I also cut the oats back a bit - by the time I had mixed the dough together it was feeling as though the full measure of one cup of oats would make it too stiff, so I cut it back to about one-third.  There's still enough oats in here, in my opinion, to kid yourself that this is health food, or excuse yourself for having them from breakfast!

The cookies smelled wonderful as they baked, and they certainly didn't disappoint.  We couldn't wait for them to cool completely, and enjoyed a couple of warm ones for a mid-morning treat before heading out to lunch.  These were everything a good cookie should be - crispy on the outside, slightly chewy on the inside, and loaded with goodies.

Chunky Monkey Cookies Recipe
Adapted only slightly from recipe from
Baking & Creating with Avril
Made 19 large cookies
Click here for a printable copy of this recipe

170g (6 oz) butter
1/2 cup Fair Trade organic cane sugar
1/2 cup soft brown sugar
1x free range egg
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1x medium-sized, All-Good Fair Trade ripe banana, mashed
1 cup plain flour
1/2 cup wholemeal flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
250g (9 oz) semi-sweet chocolate, roughly chopped
(I used Whittaker's Fair Trade Creamy Milk Chocolate)
1/2 cup rolled oats
1/3 cup roasted, unsalted peanuts

Preheat oven to 190 degrees C (375 degrees F).

In a large bowl, cream together butter and sugar, until light and fluffy.  Beat in the egg, then add the vanilla and mashed banana.  Mix well.

Sift together the flour, baking soda and salt, then add the dry ingredients to the banana mixture, and mix until only just combined.

Add the chocolate, oats and peanuts, and mix to combine.

Line a baking tray with non-stick baking paper, and place spoonfuls of cookie dough on the tray, spacing them 5cm (2 inches) apart.

Bake in the preheated oven for 12-13 minutes until golden.  Cool on the baking tray for 5 minutes before removing to a wire rack to cool completely.

Hope you enjoy these cookies as much as I did, and visit the links below to check out all the other great dishes my Secret Recipe Club friends made.

This post will also be shared at Foodie Fridays hosted by Designs by Gollam, and at Weekend Cooking hosted by Beth Fish Reads.

An InLinkz Link-up

Chocolate, Date & Banana Bread

It's no secret that making ethically responsible choices, as much as possible, about the food that I consume, is a subject which is dear to my heart, and is indeed one of the founding principles of this blog.  As such I regularly use Fair Trade products - they are always exceptionally good quality and Fair Trade principles are consistent with my own food philosophy.  So I was pretty excited a couple of weeks ago then, when a nice big hamper of gorgeous Fair Trade goodies turned up, along with an invitation to bake something delicious and join in this year's "The Big Fair Bake" event.

What you don't see in the photo, is a bunch of Fair Trade bananas, which, by the time they had traveled for a couple of days to get to me, were a bit riper than I like to eat them.  So it seemed inevitable that they would be included in my recipe.  I started thinking banana cake, but to be honest I generally prefer banana bread - it usually keeps well for several days, and makes a great snack or breakfast on the run.  Once I got to thinking about adding in some dates and dark chocolate, I knew this would elevate my regular banana bread to something really special.

Chocolate, Date & Banana Bread Recipe
Click here for a printable copy of this recipe

1/2 cup coconut oil  
1/2 cup Fair Trade organic cane sugar  
1 teaspoon vanilla extract  
2x eggs  
13/4 cups plain flour  
1 teaspoon baking powder  
1 teaspoon baking soda  
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
3x medium-sized All-Good Fair Trade ripe bananas, mashed  
1/3 cup golden syrup
1 cup Trade Aid Medjool dates, finely chopped
80g Fair Trade Whittaker's Dark Ghana chocolate, roughly chopped  

Preheat oven to 160 degrees C (325 degrees F).

Lightly grease a 23cm x 13cm (9" x 5") loaf tin, and line with baking paper.

In a medium sized bowl mix together coconut oil and sugar, then add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition.  Stir in the vanilla.

Sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda and cinnamon.  Add to the wet ingredients, and mix until just barely combined.

Add the mashed bananas, golden syrup, dates and chocolate, and once again mix until just combined - take care not to over mix.

Spoon mixture into the prepared tin, and bake for 60-65 minutes or until a skewer inserted into the centre of the loaf comes out clean.

Cool in the tin for 20 minutes before turning out onto a wire rack.  Allow to cool completely before slicing.

I will also be submitting this post to Sweet New Zealand.  Inspired by Alessandra Zecchini, and hosted this month by Libby at Ditch The Carbs, Sweet New Zealand is an event for all Kiwi bloggers (whether living at home or abroad), or all foreign bloggers living in New Zealand, to link up their sweet treats.

            

Caramelised Banana Bread

I like bananas - I like them a lot - and bananas show up in my breakfast/brunch, in some form or another, on a fairly regular basis.  Maybe sliced over a bowlful of this Tropical Fruit Granola with a dollop of homemade Greek-style yoghurt and a slosh of almond milk;  sometimes in a simple banana and vanilla smoothie;  often in this Banana, Lemon & Passionfruit "Breakfast" Ice Cream;  and sometimes sliced over a thick slathering of peanut butter (absolutely must be Pic's and must be crunchy) atop a slice of this quick and easy wholemeal bread.

So when it came to choosing a Donna Hay dish for our "Up & At 'Em" (breakfast food) theme this week at I Heart Cooking Clubs, there was a fairly good chance that bananas were going to figure in the recipe I would choose to start my day with.  A quick search of Donna's website turned up several recipes for banana bread, ranging from plain to fancy, and I knew this was the direction I wanted to head in.  Although some of the variations Donna offers sound wonderful, I was in the mood for plain and simple, so I opted for the Basic Banana Bread, though since we will be cooking with Donna Hay for several months yet I'm going to make it my mission to bake every one of the banana breads that she has on offer.  

I did ring a few minor changes to the recipe.  For a start, one thing you'll never find in my house is a fully ripe banana.  Not the ideal start for banana bread, I'll concede, but if there's one thing I can't stand it's a ripe banana - or a cooked one for that matter (no banana fritters for this girl).  No matter how I plan to eat my bananas, they must be slightly under-ripe - the skin still green tinged in places, the flesh still firm to the bite, and the sugars not yet fully developed.  So this doesn't exactly lend itself to mushing up bananas for banana bread or cake or muffins, so the technique I've developed over time is to slice up the bananas and use a small quantity of the recipe's butter and sugar to caramelise the bananas in a saute pan.  This way the bananas are cooked until they are soft enough to mash and mix into the bread/cake batter.  Now I must say that you don't get quite the intensity of banana flavour as you do with fully ripe fruit, but I prefer it that way, and the caramelising process brings some of those lovely "butterscotch" notes to the finished product.  The other change I made was substituting agave nectar for the golden syrup which was called for in the original recipe.

You could very easily trick this recipe up with any number of variations:  adding nuts or chocolate chunks, raspberries or blueberries, but plain and simple was what I was after this time around.

The final bread is deliciously moist and, although it doesn't need a good smeer of butter, it certainly tasted good with one.  I'm guessing that this will also taste great toasted in a couple of days time, if it lasts that long, in which case I reckon a slathering of Nutella might be called for.

Caramelised Banana Bread Recipe

Adapted from a recipe by Donna Hay

Click here for a printable copy of this recipe

125g (4.5 oz) room temperature butter

1 cup soft brown sugar

3x medium-sized bananas, sliced into rings

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

2x eggs

13/4 cups plain flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/3 cup agave nectar

Preheat oven to 160 degrees C (325 degrees F).

Lightly grease a 23cm x 13cm (9" x 5") loaf tin, and line with baking paper.

Measure out the butter and sugar, then melt one tablespoon of the butter in a medium sized skillet set over moderate heat.  Add banana to the pan, and sprinkle over one tablespoon of the sugar.  Saute, stirring often, until the bananas have softened to a "mashable" consistency, and become gooey and caramelised.  Remove from pan and set aside to cool.

Put the remaining butter and sugar, together with the vanilla, into the bowl of a food processor, and cream together until light and fluffy, stopping from time to time to scrape down the sides of the bowl.  Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition.

Sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda and cinnamon.  Add to the food processor, along with the agave nectar and caramelised bananas, and pulse a few times until everything is only just combined - take care not to over mix.

Spoon mixture into the prepared tin, and bake for 60-65 minutes or until a skewer inserted into the centre of the loaf comes out clean.

Cool in the tin for 20 minutes before turning out onto a wire rack.  Allow to cool completely before slicing.

 If you would like to get to know Donna Hay a little better, and to see what delicious breakfast dishes everyone else has created to kick-start their days, then do go and visit my friends at I Heart Cooking Clubs and check out the links ...

I will also be submitting this post to Sweet New Zealand.  Inspired by Alessandra Zecchini, Sweet New Zealand is an event for all Kiwi bloggers (whether living at home or abroad), or all foreign bloggers living in New Zealand, to link up their sweet treats.  This month, Sweet New Zealand is hosted by Lucy at Lucy Eats.

And, spreading the love around, I'll also be sharing this post this week at See Ya In the Gumbo hosted by the lovely, Michelle at Ms. enPlace, and at Weekend Cooking hosted by Beth at Beth Fish Reads.

           

Banana, Lemon & Passionfruit Guilt-Free Ice Cream

Could there be any better thing than eating ice cream for breakfast ... absolutely guilt-free?  I think not.  Now of course you could eat this for dessert, but personally I don't really see the point of dessert without a little guilt.  Dessert is, in my view, a time to indulge in every guilty pleasure imaginable and hang the consequences.  I'm sorry but phrases like "low-fat", "sugar-free", "dairy-free", "guilt-free" and, heaven forbid, "healthy alternative" are just not going to cut it for me when it comes to dessert.

On the other hand, if I can indulge in something that is tantamount to dessert for breakfast, without a shred of guilt .... well, that really does it for me.  And this ice cream fits the bill perfectly.  It is really nothing more than banana, yoghurt and vanilla extract - a frozen smoothie, if you like.  I love the fact that, with just a tiny bit of forward planning, you can sit up to a big bowl of this in the morning, and then go off to work with the double satisfaction of just having eaten ice cream and knowing you've had a good breakfast.  Now that's what I call a win-win.

You will need a banana, of course, cut into thin slices.  Pop the sliced banana into a snap-lock bag, and freeze for a couple of hours - I usually do this when I get home from work.  Next, remove frozen banana pieces from the freezer and put into your blender.  Add yoghurt.  Thanks to the spoils of my NZ Food Bloggers Conference goodie bag, I used a combination of The Collective Dairy's Luscious Lemon (my new favourite) and Passionfruit, but any flavour you like that would complement banana is fine.  Lastly, add a good shot of good quality vanilla extract - again, thanks to that goodie bag I used Equagold Tahitian Vanilla Syrup.  Blitz everything up in the blender until smooth, then return to the freezer to firm up.  I usually blend this up just before I go to bed, and then dig into a bowl of ice cream perfection when I get up in the morning.

Hope you give this a try.  There's something about indulging in ice cream for breakfast that makes me sail through my morning with a smug sense of satifaction .... you know that feeling you get when you feel as though you've done something a bit naughty and managed to get away with it.  Don't tell me that you don't know that feeling.

Guilt-Free Banana, Lemon & Passionfruit Ice Cream Recipe

Makes one very generous serving

Click here for a printable copy of this recipe

1x banana

1/4 cup Luscious Lemon yoghurt *

1/4 cup Passionfruit yoghurt *

* or substitute flavour of your choice

1 tablespoon vanilla syrup

Note:  If using natural, unsweetened yoghurt,
I suggest adding a tablespoon or two of honey

Cut banana into thin slices, place in a snaplock bag, and freeze for a couple of hours.

Put frozen banana slices into blender, together with yoghurt and vanilla syrup.

Blend until completely smooth.

Put into plastic container and return to freezer to firm up.

I'm sharing this post with Sweet New Zealand, a monthly blog event created by the very lovely Alessandra Zecchini, and which I'm thrilled to be hosting this month right here at Couscous & Consciousness. This is an opportunity for all Kiwi bloggers (whether you are living in New Zealand or overseas), as well as for non-Kiwi bloggers living in New Zealand, to connect and share some of those sweet treats from your kitchen.  So, head on over here to share something sweet.

Banana Chocolate & Macadamia Muffins & Cookbook Sundays # 16

I've got to begin by saying that a pet peeve of mine is blog posts which begin with an apology for not having posted for a while, and yet here I find myself with the need to do just that!!  Life seems to be totally getting in the way of blogging at the moment - actually going out and working, whilst absolutely necessary right now, definitely cuts into what used to be my blogging time.

Now admittedly, I'm not exactly working 60 hours a week, but when you suddenly go from about 7 hours work a week to 30+, then all of a sudden all your usual routines go right out the window.  And, whilst I've always liked to think of myself as a free-spirited kind of girl, capable of acting on impulse, the reality is that like most people the certainty of a regular routine is what helps to keep me grounded.  Like a tree that needs a good, healthy root system in order to flourish and move with the winds that blow, I need that "groundedness" (quite possibly not a real word) in order to think and act with both creativity and wisdom.  When I'm out of routine I feel more like a ship at sea without a reliable navigation system - nothing seems to get done as it should or on time, and my mind feels too scrambled to come up with a clear, creative thought.

So, such is my life at the moment - busy (no excuse, I know, after all - who isn't?), and just a bit out of whack!  So if you've noticed that I haven't posted a recipe in the last two weeks, or you've taken the time lately to come visit and left me a lovely comment, you're quite possibly feeling a little miffed that I haven't yet returned the visit - please bear with me - I'm in catch up mode and I will get to you.

In the meantime, I hope I can earn your forgiveness with these Banana, Chocolate & Macadmia Muffins.  I adapted these from a recipe for Banana Espresso Muffins in Super Natural Cooking: Five Delicious Ways to Incorporate Whole and Natural Ingredients - one of my favourite books from the fabulous Heidi Swanson.

I'm sharing this post this week with Cookbook Sundays (see below for more details), and also at Sweet New Zealand (see more details here) which is hosted this month by the lovely Emma at my darling lemon thyme.  I only wish that you were here to share a coffee and one of these muffins with me - the banana makes these deliciously flavourful and incredibly moist, while the chunks of macadamia nut chocolate brings plenty of texture.  I've never been much of a muffin-baker, but these were a definite hit, and will be on my regular repeat list.

           

Banana, Chocolate & Macadamia Muffins Recipe

Adapted from recipe by Heidi Swanson from

Super Natural Cooking: Five Delicious Ways to Incorporate Whole and Natural Ingredients

Click here for a printable copy of this recipe

Note:  I made a couple of small adaptations to this recipe - I omitted espresso powder (which I didn't have), but subbed in dark muscovado sugar for natural cane sugar to get that deeper, richer "caramel" flavour to make up for it.  I also subbed in macadamia nut chocolate instead of walnuts.

2 cups all purpose flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon sea salt

125g macadamia nut chocolate, roughly chopped

6 tablespoons butter, at room temperature

3/4 cup dark muscovado sugar

2x large free-range eggs

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

1 cup natural yoghurt

3 large overripe bananas, mashed

Preheat the oven to 190 degrees C (375 degrees F).

Line a 12-cup muffin tin with paper liners and set aside.

Sift flour, baking powder and salt together in a medium bowl.

In a separate, large bowl, cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy.  Add the eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition.  Add the vanilla, yoghurt and mashed bananas and stir to combine.

Add the dry ingredients and chocolate, and stir briefly and gently, until just barely combined.  Take care not to over mix.

Spoon the mixture into the prepared muffin tin, and bake in the preheated oven for approximately 25 minutes - until golden on top and cooked through.

Remove from the oven, and cool the muffins in the tin for about 5 minutes before removing to a wire rack to cool completely.

 

If you're anything like me you have dozens of cookbooks gathering dust on your bookshelves, some of which have never even been cooked from.  Sure I spent hours browsing through them when I first bought them, marking all the recipes I was going to make with little post-it notes, and yet still those books languish in the bookcase and never make it to the kitchen.  There are others from which I have made but one recipe which was such a resounding success that I've made it over and over again, and yet somehow I've never made anything else from that book.  Sound a bit familiar?!

Take comfort - you are not alone, and now Cookbook Sundays is your opportunity to change that.  Every Sunday I'm going to share with you a recipe that I haven't made before from one of my ever expanding collection of cookbooks.  And, because I know that if you have read this far then you are guilty of this too, I'm inviting you to join in with me.  Each week my Cookbook Sundays post will have a linky for you to share something you've cooked from one of your cookbooks.

The rules for joining in are simple:

1. Your post must state the author and the title of the book your recipe has come from.
2. Your post must mention Cookbook Sundays and link back to this post.  Including the Cookbook Sundays badge is optional, but always appreciated.
3. You may submit as many entries as you like, and you may use the same cookbook as many times as you like.  Old posts are also welcome.
4. Lastly,  remember that what goes around, comes around - one of the reasons you are participating in this is because you want people to read your posts, so do the right thing and go and visit a few of the other participants - you can even "Like" your favourites. 

Now, go and dust off those cookbooks and get cooking!  Use the linky tool at the end of this post to submit your entry/entries - simply scroll down to where it says "You are next ... Click here to enter", and then follow the instructions.  The linky will be open for one week.

Lastly, if you would like to use the Cookbook Sundays badge in your post, simply copy the code in the box beside the badge below and paste it into your post.  Feel free to also use it in your sidebar if you wish.

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