Is that a banana in your bread, or are you just happy to see me?

Bananas are perhaps one of my favorite fruits.  Whether they're in a whole wheat pancake for breakfast, an addition to a peanut butter sandwich for lunch, or the most important part of banana's foster (well, besides the rum... we all love rum more than bananas) for dessert, bananas can go with just about any meal of the day.  Sadly there comes a time in every banana's life - when it reaches that blackened almost rotten but oh so wonderfully pungent and squishy grossness - that it's good for one thing, and one thing only... Banana Bread!

C and I were on a smoothie-for-breakfast kick for a couple of weeks so we loaded up on both fresh and frozen fruits.  Unfortunately for the fruit, I get tired of having the same thing for breakfast day after day, so we were left with a couple bags of frozen fruit and a shit ton of fresh bananas (and for those of you who were wondering, a shit ton is slightly more than a crap ton and slightly less than a f-ton).  Anywho, C made a gallant effort to eat the bananas before they went bad.  I, on the other hand, was eyeballing them greedily, waiting for them to rot to perfection so that I could make them into a loaf of happiness (I mean really, who doesn't get warm fuzzies in their tummy at the sight of banana bread fresh from the oven). 

Tuesday rolls around and I had talked C out of eating enough of the over-ripe bananas that I had enough to make my bread.  Here's the recipe that I used: 

Ingredients

2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup butter (my stupid face forgot to take the butter out of the fridge - the microwave is my best friend)
3/4 cup brown sugar
2 eggs, beaten
2 1/3 cups mashed overripe bananas (this was about 6 bananas - hence the shit-ton)

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Lightly grease a 9x5 inch loaf pan (I say screw lightly - go big or go home).
2. In a large bowl, combine flour, baking soda and salt. In a separate bowl, cream together butter and brown sugar. At this point in the recipe your significant other will ask what you're doing, to which you can reply "creaming"  Let the hilarity ensue. Once he's stopped laughing hysterically at you, Stir in eggs and mashed bananas until well blended. Stir banana mixture into flour mixture; stir just to moisten. Pour batter into prepared loaf pan.
3. Bake in preheated oven for 60 to 65 minutes, until a toothpick inserted into center of the loaf comes out clean (or until the boy and both dogs are sitting in front of the oven drooling). Let bread cool in pan for 10 minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack to cool completely (and by cool completely I mean flop it onto the wire rack and burn yourself cutting into it because said boy is staring at it like it's the most beautiful thing since breasts and he can't possibly wait any longer).

 

  

The wait was totally worth it.  C's killed almost all of what I left at home and the boys at work double fisted it until the rest was gone.  So if you can, let your bananas age gracefully and you won't be sorry you did!

Like a Vegan, baked for the very first time

Oh c'mon!  You know you like the title!

I've toyed with the idea of going vegetarian.  The whole process of how meat gets from the farm to my table kinda oogies me out (I blame global ethics for showing me that slaughter house video.. *shudder*).  Plus, the fact that eating a vegetarian diet significantly reduces your carbon footprint is a big draw.  There's just one problem in my fantabulous plan - I like meat.  I like the way it tastes, I like the way it smells when it's cooking, heck I even like how I can turn it into whatever I want.  As a compromise, and as a way to ease my guilty meat-loving conscience, C and I eat vegetarian once or twice a week.  I give credit to those who can stick to their B-12 and Iron deficient guns and go balls to the walls and give up meat.  Way to save the Earth, guys!

Now Vegan is a whole 'nother beast.  Going vegan means giving up any and all animal products - no meat, eggs, milk, butter, yogurt, or anything else that may have been processed in contact with an animal product (sadly, this can mean sugar too).  For realz??  That's seriously half of what I eat in a day!  How do they expect me to make baked yumminess without the key players?

One of C's coworkers has a husband who is one of these crazy vegans.  She mentioned that his favorite cake is this thing called a Japanese fruitcake, but that when she makes it all veganized for him it turns out dry.

Side Note: Japanese fruit cake is neither Japanese nor a true fruit cake.  Basically it's a phony-bologna liarface cake that makes you think it's something it's not.

Appalled that my vegan friends would have to go without both delightful dairy AND baked yumminess, I decided to take this cake on as a personal challenge.  How do you make a vegan cake that does not taste and feel like a hockey puck, you ask?  Well here's how:

First I had to find a recipe for this crazy cake.  Turns out that it's a Southern tradition type of cake that is served around the holidays.  Who knew?  Second, anything that was an animal product or that potentially had come in contact with an animal product  during processing had to be removed and substituted with something else.  Below is the recipe  - My substitutions are in parentheses.

Cake

• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup chopped raisins or whole currants (make sure they're not sweetened in any way)
• 1 cup chopped pecans or walnuts
• 1-1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
• 1-1/2 teaspoons ground allspice
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
• 1 cup (2 sticks) butter, softened (crisco)
• 2 cups sugar (raw sugar)
• 4 eggs (silken tofu; 1 egg = 1/4 c tofu)
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 cup milk (vanilla soy milk - make sure it's not sweetened with sugar; the one I used was sweetened with cane juice)

Lemon-Coconut Filling

• 1 cup water
• 2 cups sugar (raw sugar)
• 1/4 cup lemon juice
• 1 tablespoon grated lemon zest
• About 3-1/2 cups freshly grated coconut, or sweetened, shredded coconut (unsweetened coconut)
• 2 tablespoons cornstarch
• 1/2 cup cold water

 Here's the link to the recipe if you want to actually make it:

http://www.globalgourmet.com/food/ild/2007/0707/japanese-fruitcake.html

I think it turned out pretty well!  It was tasty and C said that he couldn't even tell that there were no eggs, butter, or milk in the cake.  Here's what it looks like:

 

  

So what do you think?  Would you go vegan for this cake?

Cupcake Sunday: Butterfly Cupcakes

It's Sunday, and we all know what that means... cupcakes!  For those of you who haven't been following along on Facebook, I received a cupcake cookbook for my birthday/Christmas and I've been baking my way through it.  This week's cupcake is called a Butterfly Cupcake.  My first thought was, "Hmm.. crunched up butterfly, gross but interesting..." Alas, there was no butterfly in the recipe at all.  They turned out to be a pretty dense cupcake - more along the lines of a pound cake or biscuit - that had whipped cream and strawberry jam on top.  In the end they tasted like an individual strawberry shortcake.  Yum!

 

  

  

Sorry SA Techers, these won't be making it into the office! 

Ingredients:

1/2 c unsalted butter, softened

2/3 c superfine sugar

1-1/2 c self-rising flour

1/2 c milk

2 eggs

1/2 c heavy cream

1/4 c strawberry jam

confectioners sugar to sprinkle

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Line 12 standard muffin cups with paper liners.

Beat the butter, sugar, flour, milk, and eggs with electric beaters on low speed until combined.  Increase to medium speed and beat until the mixture is smooth and pale.

Divide the mixture evenly among the paper liners and bake for 15-20 min, or until a skewer comes out clean when inserted into the center of a cake.  Transfer onto a wire rack to cool.

Cut a shallow round from the center of each cake using the point of a sharp knife, then cut the round in half.  Spoon 2 tsp of cream into the cavity of each cake, then top with 1 tsp of jam.  Position the two halves of the cake round in the jam to resemble butterfly wings.  Sprinkle with sifted confectioners sugar.

And there you go!  Butterflies!

 

Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?

Spongebob Squarepants!  But his pants aren't actually square... they're more of a trapezoid shape really...

Anyway, a couple of weeks ago a co-worker of C's asked me to make a cake for her little boy's birthday party.  No problem, right?  Carrot cake seems a little odd for a 3 year old's party, but what the heck.  You want it to be Spongebob themed... d'oh.  This might take some doing...

Now I think I've gotten pretty decent at making regular cakes.  I've made some pretty amazing ones if I do say so myself.  I've made a white chocolate raspberry cake:

 

A peanut butter cake with chocolate mousse (Hungry had to guard this one)

 

A carrot cake with cream cheese icing

 

And a Red Velvet cake with French buttercream icing (so amazing and SO much tastier than the crud you get from the store!)

 

So what's the big deal, you ask?  Well first I've never made a cake for money.  Sure, I've made cakes for people, but this is the first time I've had a "real" customer.  So of course I want to make sure that she's happy.  I don't want the first thing I sell to someone to be utter crapola.  Second, I've never made a character cake in my life.  Needless to say I've been a little more than anxious about making this cake.  I don't want it to look like her 3 year old took his crayolas to the cake board and drew mommy a pretty picture of a yellow blob that may or may not be Spongebob.  In order to calm the inner panic and squash the mental "there's no way you can make this actually look like Spongebob" thoughts, I decided to have a trial run, and I think it went pretty well!  Here's what my first go at it looks like:

 

Overall I'm pretty happy with it!  I think I'm going to drop the saluting and just draw some hands with icing on the cake board.  The only other things that I might change are making the blue of the eyes a little lighter and not cutting the angle of the pants quite so sharp so his legs have a bit more room.  Obviously I need to be more careful with what gets on the board itself, but I plan on covering it with foil, so it should be much easier to keep clean.

I now feel much more confident in my ability to make this cake.  While it's not the most cost effective way to make money, I'd rather spend a little extra to practice and put out a great cake the first time around than put out a crap-tastic cake and have my fragile little reputation ruined before it has a chance to grow!

P.S. Apparently Spongebob goes around singing "lalalalalalalalala" because C has been doing this all day... just thought I'd share the "fun." ;-)  Toodles!

Squirt's Birthday

 

So for those of you who don't know me very well, I have an (perhaps unhealthy) obsession with my dog, Squirt.  Don't get me wrong, I don't dress him up in outfits, wait... scratch that...

Ok, so maybe I made him wear that for like an hour, but it was Halloween and he was only mostly miserable.  What I'm trying to say is that besides a certain someone, he's the love of my life and I'd do anything for him.  That anything just happens to include baking...  Today is Squirt's 2nd birthday!  It's hard to believe I got him over a year and a half ago because I can't imagine my life without him. 

I mean really, who couldn't love this dog??

So, in honor of Mr. Squirt's 2nd birthday I made him a puppy birthday cake. It's completely natural and doggy safe, so no worries my fellow canine lovers!  This is what the cake looked like fresh from the oven:

And of course we need a top shot:

 

Once it had cooled I whipped up a puppy friendly "icing" and decorated the cake with peanut butter:

Anyone for an extreme close up?

 Here's the recipe for anyone who is interested:

Peanut Butter Carrot Cake

1 c unbleached all purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/4 c natural peanut butter
1/4 c oil
1/3 c honey
1 c shredded carrot
1 egg

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Grease and flour a 6" round pan (an 8" will work if that's what you have).  Combine the flour and baking soda in a bowl.  Add the rest of the ingredients and mix until combined.  Pour the mixture into the prepared pan and bake for 30 minutes (less if you're using the larger pan).

"Icing" (I made this up with what I happened to have in my fridge at the moment, so feel free to improvise!)

1/3 c low fat cottage cheese, room temperature
1/4 c low fat cream cheese, softened
1 tbsp honey

Blend the bajeezus out of this until it's as smooth as you can get it.  Mine was still a little lumpy, but let's be honest, this is for a dog and he's not too concerned with presentation.

Happy birthday to my favorite leggy blond!

Welcome!

Thanks for stopping by!  Before I started posting baked yumminess, I thought it was only fair that I introduce myself.  My name is Suzanne, and I'm a twenty-something living and working in the Atlanta area.  Born and raised in northern Virginia, I've slowly migrated south over the last 5 years as both schools and jobs have required me to relocate.

I decided to start this blog for a couple of reasons.  First: I'll be the first to admit that I had a pretty crap-tastic year in 2009.  In the last twelve months I've lost my father, my grandmother, a great aunt, a close family friend, and even the family dog. But in spite of all of the bad, a lot of great things have happened too, and part of my New Years resolution was to stop focusing on the bad and focus more on what is good, great, and right in front of me.  Second: I bake constantly - I bake when I'm bored, I bake when friends need something, I bake to challenge myself - and since I bake so much, why not share it with others? Enter the Blog!

I've already started documenting a weekly cupcake journey on another social networking site that shall remain nameless... *cough* face *cough* book... but I've become increasingly unhappy with that site so I'd like to move the chronicles here.  I've started taking on small projects for money, so I'd like to use this as a way to track my progress on that front as well.

Now why the name "Baking for Pearls" you ask?  Good question.  Growing up I spent many of my afternoons at my grandmother's house.  Most of my memories from those years involve me sitting in the kitchen watching her cook for others - big family dinners that were always full of love and laughter, warm breakfasts on cold snowy days, cakes and pie for church social events, and there were always cookies in the cookie jar to be nabbed.  She's why I learned to love being in the kitchen, that food is a fantastic way to show that you care, and that sometimes it's the one thing that you can do for someone else that they would never do for themselves.  For all of those reasons I've dedicated this little adventure to my grandma Pearl and the memories I have of our time together.

 

So that's it!  I hope you enjoy, and hopefully we can all learn a little something along the way!