Going bananas for chocolate

It's confession time again... I'm a hoarder of bananas! I can't help it. My son loves bananas, so each week I buy a bunch for his lunch. I always buy too many though so at the end of the week when the midges are starting to swarm, I pop them in the freezer. Recently I had more frozen bananas in my freezer than food! This week I fixed that by making heaps of banana "stuff". For dessert after my son's dinner, I've been processing a frozen banana with a spoonful of nutella and a few macadamia nuts. The rumours are true, it does resemble and taste like ice cream (so much so that my son believes me when I offer him banana ice cream for dessert). To make this post more like my normal sugar packed editions, I also used the bananas to make a birthday cake for my parents (they are a month apart, but we were slack celebrating Mum's, so combined them this year) - a choc-banana layer cake with choc-chip swiss buttercream. The chocolate cake recipe I used was more of a crumbly cake and the banana cake recipe I used was dense, so if I were to make this again, I'd use the recipe I've posted below, which is a richer chocolate cake. ENJOY!

Sweet treat for breakfast

I've always been told that the most important meal for the day is breakfast, something to give you a good kick-start in the morning and get your body working. When I was a teenager and really conscience about my weight, I used to try and skip breakfast, but my Dad cottoned onto this pretty quick so would pretend to read the paper while I ate breakfast, but really he was watching me eat and making sure I was being healthy (couldn't get one past him).

Now I'm an adult, I'm still pretty irresponsible when it comes to breakfast. It's not a weight thing anymore, I just prefer to have a coffee in the morning, which generally gets me through to lunch time. Although, I do LOVE going out for breakfast - I'm a complicated person :-).

Anyway, last week I saw this amazing looking breakfast bake via Pinterest and I really wanted to make it for the girls (and the few boys) in my office. I bought all the ingredients over the weekend but until this morning, when my toddler dragged me out of bed at 5.25am with the line "Mummy, I need to do wee wee", I didn't really have the time to make it. So, with my early rise this morning, here is a mid-week sweet breakfast for my hard working teammates! Enjoy.

Dedicated to Ms Banoffee

Tomorrow is my friend Lisa's last day at work. I've mentioned her before, she's the one we through a baby shower for a week or so ago. Kinda obvious why she's leaving us... This post is dedicated to her.

I started at my current job at QPAC almost 4 years ago. I had wanted to work at QPAC for a long time and was so excited to finally get my foot in the door. Behind my excitement was that awkward feeling you always get when starting a new job and the over-hanging question "was changing jobs the right decision?". On my first day I met everyone in the team and they were all nice. Then I met Lisa and her warmth and instant friendship made me feel right at home. I was suppose to sit with her for about half an hour so she could explain what she does and show me a few things I'd be doing. Suddenly about 2 hours had flown by and we had barely touched on either of our roles. This kind of behaviour continued over the years. She sat separately from our team so I was to act as the bridge between her role and our team. We took this as permission to get a hot chocolate a few times a week and just chat - don't worry, we always took some spreadsheets in case we needed to talk about work. We'd get lost in conversation and completely loose track of time - this pretty much sums up our friendship. She is someone who is instantly accepting and backs me up 100%. I am really sad to see her leaving our team, but over the past 4 years I've developed a really strong friendship with Lisa and am excited that we've manage to be friends at and outside of work (and will continue to be). She's supported me through some really tough periods in my life and is always there when I need that little bit of extra help. I am now looking forward to supporting her and her hubby around the birth of their first baby (if they want me there or not haha). 

So, to send Lisa off properly I have created my own style of her favourite dessert - Banoffee Pie. My version is in a portable and easy to eat form of a cupcake. Enjoy!

The team eating some cake: Kate, Leisa, Dave and Lisa

Lazy weekends call for baking

I love lazy weekends. I don't get them often as I have a toddler who is so full of energy I sometimes wonder if I'm feeding him crazy pills! On the few weekends I can get him to have a midday nap, I either take advanatge of the quite time and also take a nap or or flip through a variety of cookbooks to dream up my next baked treat.

The weekend just passed, I decided to bake instead of sleep. It rained all week, so something sweet was definitely in order. I had a few bananas left over from lunches so thought I'd do something with those and mix it with either chocolate or caramel. I started flipping through some books I'd borrowed from the library as well as searching some of my favourite recipe sites and found a recipe for a Banana Caramel Cake - so caramel won over chocolate!

The original recipe called for sliced bananas on top of a caramel cake, however I'm not really a fan of the texture of baked bananas so I went with a more traditional style banana cake and incorporated the caramel sauce. While baking this cake the house filled with a glorious fragrant of sugar, bananas and warmth (yes, that is a smell!). Then once it came out of the oven, I realised this is the perfect afternoon tea/dessert cake!

There are a few treats you can make that work as a sweet afternoon tea cake or a decadent dessert cake. This cake serves both purposes. At room temperature it is a moist banana cake with a sweet caramel topping. Heated up slightly and served with fresh cream for dessert, it is a sticky, rich cake that smells divine! ENJOY!

An Easter dessert

The one thing I can always rely on at Easter is Hot Cross Buns. They are everywhere and my family eats them as if they are going out of fashion. So, I thought I'd try using the humble Hot Cross Bun in a basic dessert, Bread and Butter Pudding. And as it is Easter, I added chocolate - Mmmmm.

More bananas (and Nutella)

Continuing on with today's banana theme, I have made some banana cupcakes with Nutella frosting (guess that also means I'm continuing the Nutella recipes). We've been taking advantage of the cheap bananas recently, but they start going brown before we get the chance to use them all, so have been freezing them. The freezer was getting a little full, so thought it was about time I baked something with bananas. 

Normally I double this cupcake recipe to make sure there's enough, but this banana version of my usual cupcakes turned out to be a bit bigger, so I made way too many. I'm trying to loose weight at the moment, so thought I'd get other people to eat these instead of me. I've frozen a few for my toddler's lunches this week, I also made an early morning call on my brother and his girlfriend, and finally took some to today's play date. They were pretty delicious, but if I kept them at home I'm sure I'd find a way to ration that because they have bananas and Nutella that it would be ok to eat them for breakfast... you see why I had to unload them :-).

 

Saturday morning banana pancakes

I have seen people eat pancakes in so many ways and with so many flavour combinations. I remember when I was in Canada visiting my friend, her boyfriend at the time covered his pancakes with a thick layer of icing sugar and then drenched it with maple syrup. My teeth hurt just watching him. And years ago there was this great place in West End (Brisbane) which served "Canadian" pancakes, which were large, fluffy pancakes with crispy bacon, caramelized bananas and maple syrup. They were so hard to resists.

In my ripe old age of 27 though, I've grown out of having sweets for breakfast. I crave savoury (or just coffee most mornings). My toddler however loves anything sweet at any time. This morning I thought I'd surprise him with some banana pancakes. They had a lovely banana flavour and were light and golden. I suggest you pop on the kettle and whip yourself up a batch tomorrow morning!