Peanut butter and jam is something I’ve come to later in life. I grew up on butter and Marmite for breakfast, melted and scraped over slightly burnt toast or mashed together and spread on bread (which will sound delicious or disgusting depending on your love/hate stance). My Dad would mix peanut butter into his Marmite (which definitely sounds disgusting, regardless of your stance) but combining it with jam just isn’t something that happened in our household. Continue reading
Tag Archives: banana
Brown Butter Banana Bread Squares
On the eve of the French revolution, Marie Antoinette is said to have responded to claims that there wasn’t enough bread to feed the French people with the now infamous phrase, ‘Let them eat cake’. Historians have since refuted this, suggesting variously that it was completely made up, the much maligned queen was misquoted, or that something may have been lost in translation from the French into English.
Whichever way you like to look at it, there’s definitely some sort of confusion between bread and cake. Continue reading
Maple Walnut Banana Bread with Crunchy Cocoa Nibs
Banana bread with peanut butter is pretty hard to beat
It always makes me a little bit sad to read interviews where chefs explain that they can go days without eating a proper meal. I suppose it comes with the territory of working such strange hours and constantly tasting, testing and tweaking, but it does seem a shame to be surrounded by so much wonderful food and not have the opportunity to sit down and properly enjoy it.
In between school and university I spent six months abroad, working as a waitress beforehand to save money for my trip. Sixty-odd hour weeks and lots of late night shifts meant complete disruption of my body clock, compounded by the fact that the restaurant I worked in refused to serve their staff proper meals in between shifts (a practice completely counter-intuitive unless you want your waitresses wandering round ravenously eyeing up plates of food as they emerge from the kitchen). Continue reading
Banana Ice Cream with Cocoa Nib Freckles & Toasted Maple Walnuts
What’s your favourite thing to do with a blackened banana?
Breads, cakes, cookies, muffins and smoothies are all pretty wonderful ways to use up an overripe banana or two. The ice cream I’m sharing today is even better. But to be honest, I’d be happy if you made any of the items listed above, as long as your bananas don’t end up in the bin.
Ginger & Coconut Banoffee Pies
Spicy biscuit base & unctuous caramel topped with sweet banana & coconut cream
‘I am the woman who believes most anything can be solved with butter and sugar’.
So begins an article in the latest edition of Made with Butter magazine written by Joy Wilson, a baker – aka Joy the Baker – who has taken the US by storm with her irreverent attitude, quirky charm, scrumptious recipes and ability to create sheer magic using such simple ingredients as flour, butter and sugar.
Quite apart from a string of amazing accolades, her own catering company and a cookbook coming out next month, the proof that Joy knows what she’s talking about when it comes to baking is really in the pudding. Her puddings to be more precise. If you’re not already familiar with her blog, I suggest you head over there now. We’re talking brown butter banana bread, double-dipped doughnuts, chewy molasses chocolate chip cookies and more incredible cakes and bakes than most people could make or eat in a lifetime. Although I’d be willing to take up the challenge on that one . . . Continue reading