Who here has stayed at the Hilton Hotel’s DoubleTree chain? You know how they hand out warm chocolate chip cookies at check-in (or anytime you ask for them, if you didn’t know that… have a cookie craving, go to the front desk!) Anyway, purportedly, these chocolate chip cookies are that recipe. I saw it on FB and even if it was a lark, the recipe looked solid, so I gave it a go. I like to play around with chocolate chip recipes anyway. These have a touch of lemon juice and a touch of cinnamon and you bake them for longer at a lower temperature. Whether they are the actual DoubleTree recipe, I have no idea, but that’s ok too.
Browsing Tag
nuts
Have you noticed this crazy phenomenon called Banana Bread? As a person who follows a lot of food websites, chefs, fellow-bloggers and newspaper food section watcher, there is this crazy phenomenon where, I swear the collective households of the entire US are baking banana bread. Here is an article that jumped on the bandwagen.
And seeing it is bread week here at CSPS, I might as well jump on the bandwagon and make some too, right? This is my second go at banana bread during this pandemic and subsequent quarantine time and this one is simply amazing! Browned butter = yum, spiced rum (ok, if I must), banana overload (goodie) and then caramel pieces (OMG!) and walnuts (optional, but still pretty darn good). It’s sort of like bananas foster without setting the thing on fire. If you have some bananas left over while you’re sheltering in place, definitely give this one a go! (PS: don’t overfill the pans; I’d rather go for two than have an overflow!)
I know that most people eat Hot Cross Buns on Good Friday and thus I am a day early, but I had time this morning, and won’t tomorrow, so there you have it. Also, in case someone was inspired to make their own and needed a recipe. Every year I make a new variation, but the base recipe stays the same (it’s usually the things that I add — raisins or cranberries or currants or chocolate chips — or this year, apricots) that I swap out. They are actually one of my favorite things and I have to be careful that I don’t snack this whole batch. As you can see, it makes a lot of buns!
Breads, Breakfast/Brunch, Sweet Snacks
Browned Butter Bourbon Walnut Banana Bread
Browned Butter Bourbon Walnut Banana Bread
(aka Squirrel Bread)
So, a couple of different anecdotes to add today. The first one is: in German, a colloquial way of saying “hoarding” is “hamstering” (as in “I am hamstering toilet paper”). Kind of makes sense, right? Hamsters filling their cheeks with reserves (although that is when the whole TP analogy falls apart, because that would be a little gross to have TP in the mouth). I’ve always thought it a cute and funny expression.
The other story is this (and trust me, I’ll get to a point here in a minute): a few weeks ago, a friend of mine had a chocolate squirrel fall out of her freezer (sort of like chocolate bunnies, one of the companies in Germany makes chocolate squirrels around this time of year — wow, hamsters and squirrels and bunnies, all in one post) so she decided to add the now-broken squirrel into banana bread. For some reason, this struck me as funny, so this morning, as I made this Browned Butter Bourbon Walnut Banana Bread, I decided that I was just going to call it Squirrel Bread.