on the house

Cheers to the fruit shop man who kind enough to give me a bagful of ripe monkey bananas (on the house!) so I could make this and other baked goods!

Banana bread french toast has been on my to-do list since seeing it in Esquire's How to eat like a man cookbook, but never got around to it until Mrs Roddick asked if I had a low fat banana bread recipe so she could bake it for our handbag collecting friend. Unfortunately for her I didn't and could only think of more ways to make it more calorific. 

The banana chip idea was taken from this revamped banana split I saw on a food blog recently. I didn't want to open the jar of cherries so in went strawberries and a tough decision between fake maple syrup or Hershey's chocolate syrup.

Recipe notes:

Adapted this banana loaf recipe and used my usual french toast recipe.

chocolate delice

Finally had some time to make Eamon Sullivan's 10/10 chocolate delice (with salted caramel). It may seem like a lot of components but they were pretty straight forward. I didn't make the salted caramel but I thought the result was quite good without it.

I recommend halving the biscuit because you don't need that much. Or you can just re-rolled the dough and made biscuits like I did.

Before making it, just make sure to read the recipe thoroughly a couple of times. 

Check out Eamon Sullivan's blog post for step-by-step instructions and photos.

cocoa power

I'm starting to think if the food tech teachers at high school adapted their nut & crunch brownies from Alice Medrich's best cocoa brownies recipe because the ingredients are almost the same. Only the school one is more cake like. Taste and texture wise these were more like the modified school recipe.

I found the recipe on Patricia's Baby Hedgehogs, which she adapted from Hannah's honey & jam.

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My adaptions:

Roast two handfuls of nuts (mixture of walnuts, pecans & hazelnuts) at 150 degrees for 10 minutes, stirring half way. Cool and chop half of them into small pieces. Stir the chopped nuts & 40g of chopped dark chocolate into the mixture after you stir in the flour and cocoa powder.

When you put the mixture into the baking pan, top with remaining nuts & 40g of chopped chocolate.

I baked it for an addition 5-10 minutes at 120 degrees as the middle seemed to be too gooey for my liking. Cool at room temperature before chilling in the refrigerator for a few hours.