Banana Bread Pudding

Sometimes the craving for something sweet and slightly gooey and warm comes at the most inopportune time, like when you're at a relative's house for Thanksgiving and have just eaten several pounds of turkey+stuffing+cranberry sauce+cornbread+green bean casserole+ mashed potatoes+sweet potatoes+apple pie.  The logical thing to do would be to reheat the pie and eat that... except it happens to be at your grandmother's and you're staying with your cousin.  Who is a bachelor and lives like one too (aka empty kitchen).

But never fear! Sally and I are masters at baking on the fly.  Even without dear Sally, I was sure I could come up with something.  I snooped through the fridge, pantry, and kitchen shelves to discover: a couple eggs, possibly gone bad.  Milk, for when he wakes up early enough to eat cereal for breakfast.  Sugar cubes for coffee (but no coffee pot!).  Bananas, brown and over-ripe on the counter.  And half a loaf of bread, long gone stale...

Thank god your cousin is a bachelor, so no one else has to know how much of a glutton you truly are.

Banana Bread Pudding
adopted from here and here and here with so many substitutions there's almost no point in pointing them out
Ingredients
3/4 c. (1 1/2 stick) butter
5 slices of stale bread
4 ripe bananas (two mashed, two sliced)
2 eggs + 1 egg yolk
1/2 c. brown sugar
1 1/2 c. milk
(1 t. cinnamon, 1 t. nutmeg, 1 T vanilla would have been nice if I had had any)
Directions
1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees, coat an 8 x 8 pan with butter or non-stick cooking spray.
2. Melt the butter and tear up the bread into quarter-sized pieces.  Coat the bread with the butter, making sure all the pieces of bread are evenly coated.  Place bread pieces in pan.
3. Mix mashed bananas, eggs, brown sugar, and milk together in bowl.  Add cinnamon, nutmeg, and vanilla.
4. Pour milk mixture into the pan, over bread pieces.  Stir, and add sliced bananas.
5.  Place pan in oven, bake for 20-25 minutes or until custard has set.

In the Spirit of Thanksgiving

You drink spirits and give thanks, right?  Makes sense.  So does making this Cranberry-Orange Upside-Down Cake.  Especially because it has spirits and is easy to give and get a "Thanks!" in return.  Hopefully followed by an "OMG this is the best thing I have ever tasted," but you might have to work on the last part.

Cranberry-Orange Upside-Down Cake*

Sally and I have two bags of cranberries sitting in the fridge because I love them and you can only get them fresh around this time of year.  We immediately started dreaming of all the lovely desserts we could make with cranberries (cookies, cakes, and scones, oh my!).  This recipe over at Smitten Kitchen caught Sally's eye, but when we realized it called for sour cream we nixed it, because who has sour cream in their fridge, just waiting to be pulled out and used in a cake?  Yogurt, we could do, milk, definitely, and even buttermilk with the help from a little bit of vinegar... but not sour cream.  Instead we decided to go with a mash-up of recipes: one for the cranberry topping, and one for the actual cake.  The result is the following cake... with the orange thown in just because we happened to have one.  And because it adds another hyphen to the name of the recipe.

Cranberry-Orange Upside-Down Cake
adapted from Smitten Kitchen here and here
Ingredients:
Topping
2/3 cup packed light brown sugar
4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) unsalted butter
1 tablespoon honey (molasses would be a good substitute)
1/4 cup water
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon cardamon
1/4 teaspoon grated ginger
2 cups (8 ounces) fresh cranberries
Cake:
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
3/4 stick unsalted butter, softened
1 cup granulated sugar
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 tablespoon dark rum
zest from one orange
1/2 cup unsweetened orange juice
Directions
1. Preheat oven to 350°F. Grease a 9-inch round cake pan with butter or spray with non-stick cooking spray.
2. In a medium saucepan over medium heat, combine the brown sugar, butter, honey and water and bring to a boil. Stir well and pour into prepared cake pan. Set pan aside.
3. Mix together flour, baking powder, and salt.
4. Beat butter in a bowl until light and fluffy, then gradually beat in granulated sugar. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Beat in vanilla and rum. Mix in orange zest.
5. Add half of flour mixture and mix until just until blended. Beat in juice, then add remaining flour mixture, beating just until blended. (Batter may appear slightly curdled.)
6. Add the cranberries to the prepared baking pan and gently press the fruit into an even layer. Dollop the batter on top (try to go from the outside-in, otherwise the cranberries will spread out from the middle) and carefully spread without disturbing the cranberries underneath.
7. Bake on the center rack until golden and a tester inserted into just the cake comes out clean, 40-45 minutes. Remove from the oven and let cool in pan for 30 minutes. Run a thin knife around the inside of the pan then invert over a plate that is larger than your cake pan.

*sorry the picture is so blurry! It was taken with my phone.

Snickers Cookies

So Sally has this friend who is in love with Snickers candy bars.  Literally.  It's a very deep and affectionate relationship, where she promises to always love and cherish Snickers... and then she eats them.  I don't claim to understand it.
Anyway, in honor of said friend's upcoming birthday, we decided to make cookies.  Stuffed with Snickers, of course.  The recipe went something like this:

 Take lots of Snicker bars.  They don't have to be the "fun size" or the "mini" size - any kind will do.  Unwrap them from the wrapper.

 And chop them into bite size pieces.  I cut the fun sized ones in half, but you could make them smaller (or larger!) depending on how big you want your cookies to be... and the Snicker to cookie ratio.  Stick them in the fridge to make sure they don't melt later when you roll them in cookie dough.
Make your favorite chocolate chip cookie dough recipe (or peanut butter cookies would probably go along well too... so would snickerdoodles).

Then take some of the dough, and wrap it around a piece of Snickers until it's completely covered.  (Rolling the cookie dough into a ball, smashing it flat, placing the Snickers in the center and pulling up the sides of the dough seemed to work best for me.)  You might have to pull out some chocolate chips in order to fully cover the Snickers... but never fear, those lonely chips in the corner were consumed, just like these cookies.
Stick em in the oven at 350 degrees for around 12 minutes and you should be good to go!

And when they come out of the oven, they look like normal chocolate chip cookies.  Except they're not. Cause they have Snickers inside :) The caramel and chocolate from the Snickers tends to harden a little bit after the cookies cool, but you should still end up with a chewy chocolate Snickers cookie.

Oh Crepes!

Sally and I managed to get together for breakfast last weekend, and of course we couldn't help but make breakfast ourselves.  This is a basic crepe recipe, simple enough to throw together on the fly and delicious enough to satisfy even the worst breakfast snobs.  Actually, I'm not sure if this is the recipe at all, as it's firmly in Sally's possession, and since I've never managed the trick of turning out the perfectly rounded crepe anyway (I'm more of a pancake person, or so I keep telling myself) it's probably going to stay there.  Unless you feel like asking her :)

Now, even though I'm not the master crepe maker like Sally, even I know that the first crepe is always a dud.  It's too brown, or not brown enough, or there's a huge hole in the middle or you forget to put in the butter and the whole thing sticks to the pan.  Everyone makes mistakes, right?  Good thing all those fancy French chefs have anticipated your forgetfulness or klutzy fingers with a simple "throw out the first one."

These crepes can double as sweet or savory, depending on the filling you decide to add.  Personally, I've always been a fan of the traditional sugar and lemon, but Sally tried powdered sugar and lime last weekend and it was quite good.  And if you need another food to slather Nutella on, this would be one.

Crepes
adapted from Alton Brown's recipe here
Ingredients
2 eggs
3/4 c. milk
1/2 c. water
1 c. flour
3 tbsp. butter
extra butter for coating the pan

Directions
 Combine all ingredients in a bowl and whisk for a minute or two.  Place batter in the fridge for 1 hour (Sally and I have skipped this step often, so if you're in a hurry, don't worry about it.  Refrigeration will allow bubbles to settle down and prevent tearing later.).
Heat a small non-stick pan (medium-low).  Add butter to coat the pan.  Pour about 1/4 c. of the batter onto the center of the pan, lifting and turning the pan to spread evenly as you pour.  Cook until the underside is a light brown and flip.  Cook until both sides are light brown, then remove from pan.  Add butter every 3-4 crepes.

*Savory: add 1/4 tsp. salt and 1/4 c. herbs/seasoning to the batter
*Sweet: add 2 1/2 tbs. sugar, 1 tsp. vanilla extract to the batter