Banana Bread for Baby Beckett 10/12

We've been doing a lot of baking this year but nothing compared to Sara's best friend Briana, who has had a different kind of bun in the oven. To celebrate the birth of Briana and Brian's baby boy Beckett, we baked banana bread. Too much alliteration? Too bad, too late. 

We had a lot of fun with this one (if you couldn't tell already.) There's a lot of fun to be had with bananas.

It can also be dangerous though, so you should always be careful with them.

We chose the recipe from the joyofbaking.com website because we've liked other recipes from there. We did omit the nuts though cause we're already going bananas with the bananas, we don't know what would happen with the nuts.

We mashed the bananas and that was perfect cause it ended up looking like baby food, not that Beckett could eat it. Its the same dilemma as with Oliver's Cupcakes but at least the new parents will be able to appreciate it. 

The wet ingredients mixed with the dry ingredients and you can't tell from this picture, but they smelled really good. Imagine vanilla, cinnamon and banana. That doesn't sound great, but it is.

We made 2 so that we could taste one and freeze the other, then FedEx it off to the newly enlarged family. Gotta taste it. It's very important.

As you can see, we used one glass dish and one metal one. This would have been a good experiment in seeing the difference if one wasn't slightly bigger than the other. The metal one did take longer to bake but they both came out great.

Lessons learned: This was easy and fun. We gotta bake with fruit more often. We will get it eventually. :o)

Bread 6/26

A few posts ago, okay maybe more than a few, we made pretzels.  For these pretzels, we had to purchase bread flour.  So when you have bread flour, you make bread.  We have never made bread before and have only used yeast once before on the pretzels.  Our family friend almost always brings this excellent dill dip and bread at family functions.  So we picked a recipe for soft white bread and made dill dip too.

The bread recipe can be found here and the dill dip can be found here.

With this recipe, there are only a few a ingredients but it calls for patience and lots of it. The dough is kneaded for 8 to 10 minutes, which is an arm workout too.

Then it needs to rise to double its size after it is mixed (about 20 mins) and again after it is put in the pan before it is baked (about 20 mins again).  We didn't measure if it was exactly double in size but we when you can say "wow that is bigger," it' a good indicator.  If you need something to entertain you while you wait, this is what we have been laughing about of late. Yeast rises best in 80 - 85 degrees.  To get this temperature, cooks illustrated recommends heating the oven to 200 degrees for ten minutes and then turn it off and put your dough in the oven in a non metallic bowl.

We baked the bread for 40 mins according to the recipe said but didn't keep as close of an eye on it like we should so our bread came out a little bit burned on the edges.  We would recommend to start checking your bread at 30 mins or so and when the bread becomes brown, take it out.

The smell of baking bread is soooo good.  It is smells like down home goodness.  I am not sure that makes sense but you bake it and let us know what you think it smells like.

Here is the lovely bread with dill dip.  mmm mmm mmm

Lessons learned: Don't get too involved watching "Justified" and think that your bread isn't going to burn.