Recipe: Banana Monkey Bread

Banana Monkey Bread for Two

1-3 bananas (depending on how much you love bananas - I used 2, but kind of wish I'd used 3)

1 pack of biscuits (10-pack)

1/2 cup brown sugar

1/2 cup white sugar

1/4 cup butter

1 tsp cinnamon

Mix cinnamon and sugar.

Cut biscuits into quarters and slice bananas. Coat biscuit pieces and bananas with cinnamon sugar.

Grease small oven-safe serving dishes. Arrange biscuits and bananas in dishes.

Combine melted butter and brown sugar. Pour over biscuits.

Bake monkey bread in oven preheated to 350 for 20-25 minutes.

Recipe: Green Tea Butter Cookies

Lately, I've been trying to cut back on spending. One great change I made was ordering the concentrated Starbucks teas online instead of going to Starbucks every morning (that's a $20/week savings!). Well, I thought I'd spice things up a bit for myself by ordering the green tea concentrate, but it turns out I'd much prefer to stick with my plain old chai.

So now I'm stuck with two boxes of green tea concentrate that I haven't a clue what to do with. But wait! What about cookies? Oh, yes. A nice creamy tea cookie, I thought. So I went in search for some yummy looking grean tea butter cookies. Unfortunately, I only found recipes that used the matcha powder or tea leaves instead of the liquid version. And since cookies are one of those things that not a lot of liquid goes into, it's hard to just substitute green tea for whatever liquid is in the recipe. I did finally stumble upon this recipe over at Cooks.com.

It was way bigger than I wanted, so I cut it down a lot. I also noticed that this recipe comes out much stickier than most cookies. And the cookies don't come out very sweet. I'm definitely going to be revisiting this recipe soon. I think I'll substitute all of the cream for green tea and add a cup of sugar - that should help both problems.

Green Tea Butter Cookies

{Ingredients}

7.2 oz butter, softened

4.96 oz sugar

1/4 cup cream

4.96 oz all-purpose flour

1.25 teaspoon salt

4.96 oz cake flour

2.5 teaspoons baking powder

2 teaspoons vanilla

2 tablespoons green tea concentrate

{Directions}

Cream butter and sugar together. Gradually beat in cream and vanilla. Stir dry ingredients together and add to butter mixture. Add green tea flavoring.

Chill dough for two hours.

Spoon dough onto cookie sheet lined with parchment paper and bake at 350 degrees for 15 minutes.

Let cool and enjoy!

Recipe: Potato Apple Gratin Casserole

I found this great recipe on RealSimple while searching for casserole dishes for the holidays, and decided to whip it up for dinner.

I reduced the recipe by 1/3, and I used red potatoes instead of baking potatoes because that's just what we had on hand.

Potato Apple Gratin Casserole



What you'll need.

2 eggs

1 pint buttermilk

2/3 tablespoon thyme

1 1/3 teaspoon salt

a pinch pepper

3 red potatoes, peeled and chopped

3 granny smith apples, peeled and chopped

a little under a block of swiss cheese, shredded

about half a package of parmesan cheese, grated

{Step 1}

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F and grease your dish. Whisk together the eggs buttermilk and spices. Set aside.

{Step 2}

Layer a portion of the potatoes, apples, and cheeses. Pour a portion of the egg mixture on top.

{Step 3}

Repeat Step 2 until all ingredients are used.

{Step 4}

Cover and bake for 1 hour and 15 minutes. Then bake uncovered for 15 minutes.

 Mine ended up bubbling over, but that's because I filled them up with no wiggle room. And I'm not sure if the cheese came out so done on top because it baked too long or I forgot to pour the egg mixture after adding the cheese on the top layer.

Either way, Martin thought of putting bacon on the bottom next time, but I think that would leave me with soggy bacon. Maybe a lattice top of bacon would come out crunchy enough for my tastes. Mmmm... I can't wait to try that!

Recipe: Sugar Cookies

While baking pie last weekend, I found this set of cookie cutters with the batch of pie-making things my mom gave me years ago - and just in time for fall! To celebrate this unexpected find, I decided to bake some good old-fashioned sugar cookies.

While the dough was chilling in the fridge, I started mixing up some marshmallow fondant for decoration. The colors didn't come out as poppy as I'd have liked them to be, but that's because I only had regular food coloring on hand and not gel colors.

Classic Sugar Cookies

{What you'll need}

1 1/2 cups butter, softened

3 cups sugar

4 eggs

2 teaspoons vanilla

5 cups flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon salt
cookie cutters

{Step 1}

In large bowl, cream together butter and sugar until smooth. Beat in eggs and vanilla. Stir in the flour, baking powder, and salt.

{Step 2}

Cover and chill dough for at least one hour (or overnight). I like to dust the outside of my dough with a light layer of powdered sugar.

{Step 3}

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Roll out dough on parchment paper dusted with powdered sugar. I roll my dough out really thin because I like my cookies to have a nice crunch to them. Cut shapes with cookie cutters. Peel the dough away from shapes. Place shapes on greased cookie sheet. Bake 8 to 10 minutes in preheated oven. Cool completely.

{Step 4}

Decorate! Use your favorite frosting, fondant, or glaze. I decided to try out this recipe I found for marshmallow fondant. I halved it and added my color at the end so I could make multiple colors. I'd like to work with some other colors throughout the week - maybe buy some vodka so I can paint them! Because the fondant comes out so sweet, I'd drop down to 2 cups of sugar instead of 3 for the cookie dough.