This banana bread is moist, flavorful, simple & versatile — it’s been our go-to banana bread recipe for over a decade. Not in the mood for chocolate chips? Toss in some dried cranberries or some toasted walnuts — even a plain slice never disappoints!
It’s easy to double the recipe to make two loaves. If you can find them, we like to use Ghirardelli or Guittard chocolate chips — you can use semi-sweet but we prefer using bittersweet to balance things out a bit. The bread can be wrapped in plastic & kept at room temperature for up to three days — but it never lasts that long at our place!
Just in time for St. Patrick’s Day, how about making some Irish Cream Frosted Cupcakes for a treat?
Celebrate St. Patrick’s Day with a tasty frosting spiked with Irish Cream.
A simple butter cake (cheater method using a box cake, but tweaked a bit) with homemade buttercream frosting, spiked with a bit o’ Irish Cream! Subtly delicious and would be just as tasty on a chocolate cupcake as well. I made half of the cupcakes with the basic batter and threw a handful of chocolate chips in the batter for the second half.
Time for a pint of Guinness before hunting for that lucky four-leaf clover!
I like to bake, but the true baker in our house is my husband. Most of the baked items I post will be his creations (just wait ’til Christmas cookie season…his cookies are not only tasty, but absolutely gorgeous)! He’s quite the purist when it comes to ingredients and when we bake and things are typically always from scratch, but several years ago I picked up a copy of The Cake Mix Doctor by Anne Byrn and found a chocolate cake recipe that we both love.
We’ve made these cupcakes for all sorts of occasions…the version you’ll see here was made for our daughter’s Frozen-themed birthday party.
Many chocolate cakes that we’ve had over the years are either too dry or not nearly chocolatey enough. This cake is light and fluffy with a fantastic chocolate flavor and is wonderful with or without frosting. They also freeze quite well (unfrosted) — the texture becomes a bit more dense after they’ve been frozen, but they are great to keep on hand in the freezer for those days that you need a bit of a chocolate fix (without eating a whole cake).
The batter is beautifully glossy with a silky texture that gets quite thick after mixing it.We made our favorite frosting, added a drop or two of food coloring to get the correct “Frozen” shade. The birthday girl was on sprinkle duty and she also added the blue candies on top. Such a fun way to get the little ones to help in the kitchen!
Hope you give these a try — they’re a great treat!
We’ve tried so many different types of peanut butter cookies over the years & they are often sub-par…either too sweet or too greasy/oily, with very little peanut flavor. We have found one recipe that has consistently beat out all the rest. These peanut butter cookies are somewhere between chewy & cake-like…they have a slight crisp around the edges and are wonderfully puffy in the center. Using chunky-style peanut butter in combination with the extra addition of crushed peanuts gives a peanut flavor above all others we’ve tried.
This amazing recipe, adapted from our well-worn, 2004 copy of Baking Illustrated by the Editors of Cook’s Illustrated Magazine, is by far our absolute favorite. We hope you enjoy it as much as we do!
