Gluten-Free Double Chocolate Banana Bread

When the freezer rains bananas, I know it's time to make a banana bread. 

We buy bananas just about every week, eat most, but inevitably have one hanging around long enough to turn brown. I hate food waste, so I usually tuck the little fella into the freezer. There's got to be a dozen bananas in there right now, in every available crevice. Sometimes they throw themselves at me when I open the freezer door to grab an ice cube or ponder the evening's dinner possibilities. The other day, three different bananas suicided themselves, so I put them on the counter to thaw. 

When frozen bananas thaw, they become rather liquidy, which makes them perfect for smoothies. But also banana bread. Most recipes call for very ripe bananas which need to be mashed with a fork. Personally, I prefer using near-liquid banana. It doesn't need to be mashed, just stirred in, which produces sweet little pockets of soft fruit in the finished product. If you're a fan of a more homogenized texture, then by all means mash some never-frozen but overripe nanners for this recipe.

Oh yeah, the recipe. I usually put walnuts and chocolate chips in my banana bread, but I've been craving chocolate recently (I probably need more magnesium). I consulted the Google and found a chocolate chocolate banana bread recipe that was essentially Martha Stewart's non-chocolate recipe, with a couple of random tweaks. I happen to think Martha's recipe is the very best, so I consulted her web site and used her recipe, with two changes. Her recipe calls for 1 1/2 cups of AP flour, but I wanted to make this gluten-free and add cocoa powder. Cocoa is fairly similar to flour in heft and texture, so I swapped out a half cup of flour for a half cup of cocoa. The rest of the flour was replaced by oat flour. You may use any gluten free flour you wish, but I strongly suggest adding 1/4 teaspoon of xantham gum per cup of gf flour. You may leave it out, but the gum makes a big difference in the texture of the bread. Honestly, I cannot tell that I didn't use regular flour. I'm not your mother, so do as you please, but don't come crying to me afterward. The one other thing I changed was to add more sour cream. A quarter cup is good, but a half cup is better. It makes the texture outrageously moist. (Greek yogurt works here, too.)

If you make this, let me know in the comments. I'm going to go cut myself another slice to go with my coffee.

GF Double Chocolate Banana Bread

1/2 cup cocoa powder

1 cup oat flour

1/4 t xanthan gum

1 t baking soda

1/4 t kosher salt

1/2 cup butter, or dairy-free butter substitute, melted

2/3 cup sugar

2 large eggs

1/2 cup sour cream

1 t vanilla extract

3 super-ripe bananas, mashed if fresh, thawed if frozen

1 cup milk chocolate chips

1/2 cup chopped walnuts

 

Preheat oven to 350º.

Spray the inside of a 9 x 5 loaf pan with Pam or similar release spray. Borrow a tablespoon or so of the cocoa powder and sprinkle it over the Pam, shaking and banging the sides of the pan to make sure every surface is coated with both release spray and cocoa. Knock out any excess cocoa.

Combine the rest of the cocoa, oat flour, xanthan gum, baking soda, and salt and stir well with a fork to distribute ingredients. If you're fussy, you could sift it, but I don't see the need to dirty a sieve or sifter.

In a large bowl, combine the melted butter, sugar, eggs, sour cream, and vanilla. If your bananas were frozen, you can basically pour them into the bowl, otherwise, scrape in the mashed bananas and give it a good stir.

Dump the dry ingredients into the wet and stir well. You don't want any streaks of flour. Fold in chocolate chips and walnuts. 

Scrape batter into baking pan and bake for 1 hour, or until toothpick comes out clean. You might have to try a few spots, in case you stab a melted chocolate chip.

Cool in the pan on a rack for 20 minutes. Run a paring knife around the edge of the pan to loosen bread, then turn over onto the rack. Put another rack on top and flip the bread over, so the top is...on top. Allow to cool completely before slicing. You can, of course, ignore this direction, but I can't guarantee the bread won't fall apart when you slice it.

Posted on Minxeats.com.

August Uncommon Tea

I'm a bit of a tea addict. I practically collect it. When I'm in NY, I always stop in my favorite tea shop and emerge with $50 worth of goodies from rooibos to oolong. I even follow tea company accounts on Instagram. And you know those scary Facebook ads, the ones that are hawking products that are almost always exactly something that you've been looking for or didn't know you needed? Sometimes mine are for tea. I'm pretty sure that's how I discovered August Uncommon Tea. In any case, they have every type of tea one needs in life, from dark and rich to light and floral with everything in between, and all are available in 14g deluxe samples, which are good for four cups of brew. Try before you buy is my motto!

I went a little crazy and purchased a baker's dozen of samples last fall, just at the beginning of peak tea drinking season. I justified the number as I planned to give a few to a tea-drinking friend, though in reality he only received three. And I had a hard time deciding which ones to give up.

Some of the teas have fairly unusual ingredients, like the Leatherbound which has an obvious caraway note. The Black Lodge features smoky banana and black truffle. I think both of these flavors are my favorites of the ones I've tried thus far.

And of course I do plan to try more. In fact, I have the site open in another browser tab and have already put a few more samples in my shopping cart. (Psychocandy! Biarritz!) This is one addiction that is not harmful--well, except that caffeine gives me heart palpitations, but I never drink *that* much tea. (That would be a lot.)

Tell me - are you a fan of tea? What is your favorite type? Do you prefer herbal blends or real tea? To be honest, I like it all. Because of the caffeine thing, I need to drink more decaf teas, so Rooibos is always on my playlist. But I can't quit black tea, which is actually my fave. I just maybe drink less of it. Maybe.

* Any products in this post that are mentioned by name may have been provided to Minxeats by the manufacturer. However, all opinions belong to Minxeats. Amazon links earn me $! Please buy!

Posted on Minxeats.com.

Chocolate Pound Cake

We ran out of Christmas cookies recently (yes, we did bake a lot!) and needed something else to put in our weekend bowl of ice cream (along with the ice cream). Mr Minx suggested chocolate pound cake, so I searched through our cookbook collection for a recipe that: 1) required regular cocoa powder; 2) did not require buttermilk or sour cream. Because I wasn't going to run to the store.

The cookbooks let me down, so I consulted teh Innernets. Martha Stewart offered a recipe that fit the bill, but I went back to Google to find something better. And I did - at Cook's Country. Hey, if the folks at America's Test Kitchen/Cook's Country come up with something, what with all the intense noodling around they do with recipes, I figure it's worth a try.

They say, "We retooled the classic pound cake recipe to make it plush and ultra-chocolaty. We did away with the need for chemical leaveners by properly creaming the butter and sugar." And damn if the result wasn't indeed plush - the cake's crumb is very fine and dense, resembling suede. And beating the hell out of the butter, sugar, and cocoa mixture before adding the eggs did create a cake that rose high in the pan without the use of baking powder or baking soda. The Martha Stewart recipe called for only 1/4 cup of cocoa powder, plus chocolate chips. It's probably not as chocolate-y as a recipe with 3/4 cup of cocoa plus an additional 2 ounces of milk chocolate. Oh, and while it calls for Dutch process cocoa, because there's no leavening in the cake, regular cocoa (Hershey's) works just as well.

Tastes marvelous with ice cream, and on its own as well.

Posted on Minxeats.com.

As Black As My Soul

Now tell me those aren't the ugliest cookies you've ever seen. They look like a Rocco Dispirito experiment gone awry, or maybe the digestive result of eating said experiment. The photo honestly doesn't do these double chocolate malt cookies justice - they are even uglier in person. The Hershey's Special Dark cocoa made them so dark brown they are nearly black. (Note: both items I've made so far with that cocoa seem inordinately salty, despite having relatively small amounts of salt. I think the flavor of the cocoa just doesn't work well with salt and probably won't buy it again unless I am desperate.) Those shiny/melty bits in the cookies are actually Ghirardelli 60% cacao dark chocolate chips. And they look pale by comparison. The lighter brown bits are nuts, and the light yellow-ish bits (no they are not corn) are melted malt ball centers.

Malt ball centers? Since the cookies are pretty gross-looking, you're probably thinking I did something equally disgusting to get to the centers, like maybe lick off the chocolate. But no. The centers are sold by my new favorite Internet merchant, Nuts Online. Last September I purchased a bag of teff flour for making authentic Ethiopian injera. I loved the fast service and the quality of the product, so before Christmas, I ordered several pounds of nuts and dried fruits for making holiday treats, plus a bag of their peppermint malted milk balls. OMG - Best. Malted. Milk. Balls. Ever. We recently ran out of nuts, so I placed another order, this time trying their huge, candy-like dried strawberries, mochi, and the malt ball centers. Tasty enough on their own, I thought they'd also make a good addition to cookies or brownies.

While not exactly a good idea, they weren't a bad idea, either. The sugar content is pretty high, so the malt ball centers melted and oozed a bit. They taste fine - but subtle. If you don't have them, don't worry about it - the cookies will taste quite good without them. And...the longer they sit, the better they taste.

Black as My Soul Double Chocolate Malt Cookies

3/4 cup sugar
3/4 cup brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 cup softened butter
2 cups flour
1/2 cup cocoa powder
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 bag Ghirardelli 60% cacao chips
1 cup malted milk ball centers, lightly crushed
1/2 cup mixed nuts

Preheat oven to 345°F.

Cream the butter and sugars together, add eggs one at a time, then stir in the vanilla. In a bowl combine the flour, cocoa, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Add the flour to the butter mixture in batches, mixing well to combine. Stir in chocolate chips, malt balls, and nuts. Onto a Silpat- or parchment-covered baking sheet, scoop dough in generous 2-or-3 tablespoon dollops, flattening with your hand to about 1/2 inch thick. Bake 12 minutes until browned. Remove cookies to a rack to cool. Makes about 3 dozen.

Posted by theminx on Minxeats.com.

Goth Brownies

Chocolate maven Alice Medrich is one of my Facebook friends and the other day she posted a link to her brownie recipe in the February 2011 issue of Bon Appetit. I realized I had not yet even removed the magazine from its plastic sleeve and, after doing, so, turned directly to the recipe. It seemed pretty simple, and I was craving chocolate, so I thought I would make them right there and then.

Medrich recommends using non-Dutch-processed cocoa, but all I had on hand was Hershey's Special Dark cocoa--a blend of natural and Dutched cocoa--which turned my brownies nearly jet-black. Kinda goth, don't you think? I also substituted chopped hazelnuts for the walnuts, because that's all I had.

The verdict? They were fine, but had perhaps a bit too much texture, the polar opposite of Rocco's refried-beans-smooth diet disaster. While the Bon Appetit brownies were moist and chewy, they were a bit sandy-textured. I followed the recipe exactly, and I am of the opinion that the melted butter shouldn't have been taken off the heat before the sugar was added, which might have allowed the sugar to dissolve a bit more. But what do I know except for my own palate?

Tasty, good, etc., but I still haven't found a recipe to come close to my favorite recipe that uses Ghirardelli Sweet Chocolate and Cocoa. What's your favorite brownie?