Banana, caramel and date cookies

I'm afraid that this is another case of the finished product looking rather less than it tastes. These small, round brown blobs looking distinctly unfestive are probably one of the best things I've made this year, which is pretty high praise given the amount of baking that I've done over the past few months! I can't put my finger on what makes them so tasty, but I will share the recipe so that you can share my joy at the taste of these biscuits. I would wholeheartedly recommend you make them for loved ones, or just for yourself this Christmas time as a real treat. You won't regret it!

The recipe for these lovely cookies comes from a recently acquired book 'Biscuits & Macaroons' published by ACP publications and bought from Marks & Spencer. It contains so many delicious looking biscuit and slice recipes that I am having trouble deciding which ones to try first. What decided it for this recipe was the presence of a manky ripe banana and some dates left over from the I should Cocoa challenge a while back. I'm so glad I had these ingredients to hand because this recipe is a keeper. I have altered it slightly from publication, and will give my instructions for making them too.

Banana, date and caramel cookies

Ingredients

125g soft butter

220g light muscovado sugar

1 medium banana, very ripe (about 140g with skin)

300g plain flour

1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda

75g finely chopped dried dates (I snipped mine with scissors)

18-20 chewy toffees (I used Werther's chewy toffees - a 135g packet gave just enough with one left over as cook's perk!)

Method

- Preheat the oven to 180C/gas 4. Line two large baking sheets with silicon parchment paper.

- Cream the butter and sugar until combined and light. Add the banana, mashing it against the side of the bowl and then mix it in.

- Mix in the flour, bicarbonate of soda and then when combined, the dates.

- Chop the toffees in half (I did this with scissors again). Form balls of the mixture (about walnut sized) and push half a toffee into the centre of each, moulding the ball closed with your fingers.

- Place on prepared trays and then bake for 20-25 minutes. I baked for 25 minutes, but wished that I'd taken them out after 20 because the edges were a little too crisp. They did soften after a couple of days though, which was delicious!

- Allow to cool a little on the trays - this is important because otherwise the toffee sticks to the paper, pulling the cookies apart when you try to lift them (....speaks the voice of experience!) then allow to cool completely on a wire rack.

Yeah, try and contain the piece of caramel in the middle of the biscuit dough when shaping. I clearly didn't manage it and some tried to escape..... still delicious though! The edges of the cookie were slightly crisp, but softened after a couple of days. They were lovely and sweet but with the caramelly and slightly complex edge that the muscovado sugar and dates give, and deliciously chewy in the middle from the toffee. I would like to try them again, perhaps pushing a piece of bitter chocolate into the centre with the toffee to add a different flavour note to them. I seem to have found another way to enjoy dates, the dried fruit of which I never think that I'm very fond, and equally good, a way of using up just one overripe banana.

My colleagues loved these, and quite a few people commented on how good they were, a sentiment with which I can only agree.

Butterscotch banana cake

I am still here, I promise, it's just that work has been getting in the way of food recently - always annoying. I was at a conference last week and nothing foodie to report, except that we went to Sapporo Tepanyaki for dinner one evening, which was interesting and exciting!

I've been baking, but nothing new recently - I met up with friends in London a week ago, and took this chocolate orange and vanilla marble cake, which went down well. However, it was quite heavy lugging it around London all day, especially as we were meeting at Westminster and the District and Circle lines and Jubilee line were closed - walk from Victoria anyone??? Anyway, it was a lovely day, with a lovely pic nic, even if it did try to rain on us!


So here's one I made earlier. Butterscotch banana cake. I've had my eye on this one for a while. Eventually I'll work my way through all of the recipes in the rather excellent guide to baking given away with the Guardian in November 2007, it's just that I'm a little slow to get round to some of them. I like banana cake, not just because it allows me to use up fruit that has gone beyond all hope of eating raw (more ideas here), but because it generally just tastes great!

This one particularly appealed because it consists of caramelizing the bananas first in yummy sugar before proceeding to the recipe. Sounded interesting so with the correct ingredients located I proceeded. Sadly not without hitches, but I'll come to that later. You can find the original recipe here. I have made a few minor alterations - I used some granulated sugar, didn't have quite as much banana flesh as specified and missed out the spices. I wanted naked banana flavour.

Butterscotch banana cake
Ingredients
150g white granulated sugar
100g caster sugar
200g banana flesh, chopped into 2cm pieces
1 tbsp unsalted butter
2 tsp vanilla extract
175ml sunflower oil
2 large eggs
150g plain flour
75g wholemeal flour
2 level tsp baking powder
½ level tsp bicarbonate of soda
50ml plain yoghurt

Method
- Butter a 22-23cm round tin and line the base with non-stick baking paper.
- Tip 150g of the caster sugar into a frying pan with 25ml water, bring to the boil, then cook over a high heat until the sugar turns to a dark reddish caramel.
- Add the banana pieces, butter and vanilla, and simmer until the bananas break up in the caramel and the mixture is thick.
- Spoon on to a plate and leave to cool.
- Beat the remaining 100g sugar with the oil and eggs until thick and slightly aerated, then beat in the bananas and the yoghurt.
- Sift the flours, baking powder and soda together two or three times (throwing the bran back in), then fold this through the banana mixture.
- Spoon the mixture into the tin, heat the oven to Gas 5/180C (160C fan-assisted) and bake for about 50 minutes or until a skewer inserted comes out clean.

Notes: I preheated my oven first of all. I don't really understand why the instructions are given like that, and I didn't really notice because the first thing I do is preheat the oven. Ooops. I'm sure Dan has a good reason.

Caramel. Now the first time I ever tried a caramel (not for this!) it worked. I think this was pure beginners luck. Not so here. The first time, I followed the recipe as specified (my frying pan is non-stick) and ended up with a sort of lump of solid yet spitting sugar. This is bad. I didn't want to ramp up the heat any more for fear of destroying my frying pan. I need that pan, it's used almost daily!!! Second time I tried again but in a normal (i.e. not non-stick) metal pan. Same results. After much agonising and asking J's advice (and reading the post by Zeb in this very helpful thread on Dan's forum message board) I decided to use granulated sugar and no water to start with. This worked fine, and first time. When the caramel was the colour I wanted, I added the water, which hissed and spat and solidified the caramel but it all then came back fine. I added the banana and proceeded. You can see the banana in the picture below. Yum!



Caramelising the bananas in the sugar smelled so delicious I was tempted to forget about making the cake altogether and just sit down, me and the pan of luscious caramelly bananas and eat.... mmmmm, sweet, sweet bananas!!!

I found that the cake sank very slightly in the middle - you can't really tell from this picture though, and it didn't seem to affect the texture of the cake either so it didn't really matter.

My colleagues loved this cake. I can understand why - it was very banana-ry and very moist without being at all dense or heavy - it really is a very light cake as Dan promises. However, my only reservation was that to me it tasted a little oily. Perhaps this is necessary as the cake is so moist and it may just be my perception, because no-one else had a problem with that at all. It's very different to a standard banana loaf type cake, and definitely worth trying, but it's not one I'll keep coming back to over and over again.

You can see just how moist and light the cake is, and the colour truly is yummy.

Toffee ginger cakes with fudgy icing

I don't often go to Waitrose, since it's about a twenty five minute drive from me, passing about five other supermarkets on the way! but I like to go occasionally to browse the special offers (which can sometimes be very competitive - who says Tesco is always cheapest?) and when I'm there I try and pick up the monthly recipe cards that they produce. There are usually 8 or 9 each month, showcasing seasonal ingredients and there tends to be a starter, meat, fish, veggie, childrens etc, and usually a baking/dessert one. This month toffee ginger cakes with fudgy icing was the recipe.

It just sounded perfect for the time of year - it's been really cold recently all of a sudden and ginger is such a lovely warming spice. These seemed the perfect way to use ginger in a cupcake. The recipe is based on the Waitrose one here, but because I tend to buy large rather than medium eggs I upped the amounts of flour, sugar and butter, as shown below.

Toffee ginger cakes with fudgy icing

Ingredients

120g soft butter

120g light brown soft sugar

1tsp ground ginger

25g golden syrup (I didn't weigh this, just put about a tbsp in!)

120g self raising flour

2 large eggs

For the fudgy icing:

25g butter

50g light brown soft sugar

2 tbsp warm water

100g icing sugar, sifted

To decorate:

Pieces of crystallised stem ginger and fudge

Method

- Preheat the oven to 200C/Gas 6. Place paper cases in a 12 hole muffin tin.

- Beat the butter and sugar together with an electric whisk for 2-3 minutes until pale and creamy.

- Beat in the ginger and golden syrup until well combined.

- Add the flour and eggs and beat like crazy with the electric whisk. (OK, so these aren't the original instructions - they tell you to gradually add a little egg followed by a little flour, etc until both are used up. Do that option if you have the patience. I don't!)

- Spoon into the paper cases and bake for 15-20 minutes until golden and well risen. Place on a wire rack to cool.

NB They may take longer than 20 mins because they are slightly bigger than the original recipe, but do check at 15 mins because the oven is hotter than usual for little cakes and mine were a little overbrowned on the tops by 20 minutes.

For the icing

- Melt the butter and brown sugar in a small saucepan.

- Bring to the boil, add the water and simmer for 5 minutes. It will look very runny.

- Remove from the heat and beat in the icing sugar until smooth. It stiffens up, and if it becomes too stiff add boiling water a little (i.e. 1 tbsp) at a time to soften it.

- Spread over the cakes and decorate with the chunks of fudge or crystallised stem ginger. The icing sets with a crust so it's best to decorate as quickly as possible.

Mmmm, fudge! I went heavy on the fudge for the ones I took into work, but heavy on the crystallised ginger for me, because I love it. It might be a bit of an acquired taste though!

All packaged up and ready to go into work, where they were extremely well received. Plently of praise for these gently spiced little buns.

Chocolate caramel mud cakes

Well, if the name isn't enough I don't know what'll tempt you to make these rather delicious little cakes. I recently treated myself to one of the Australian's Women's Weekly little cookbooks - Cupcakes and Cookies. I quite like this series, the books are small and light, perfect for carrying around and well priced, at £3.50 each, which is only about 20p more than the current food magazine prices in the UK. Plus you then have a neat little book to keep, rather than thinking about whether or not to throw away/recycle the magazine (I usually, well always I suppose, keep my magazines, and yes, I am running out of space to store them....) and whether those recipes you ripped out will ever get made or not. Anyway, I digress. This particular book has been well perused during coffee breaks at work and there is a large mental list of 'bookmarked recipes' in it. So I thought I'd make a start on them.

I had in mind the caramel mud cakes (pg 17, if you're interested!) but when it came to the time for cooking, I discovered I had no white chocolate. (Unheard of for me not to have every type of chocolate under the sun in the house, but it somehow came to pass - fear not though, I've now rectified this oversight and have a couple of bars of the white stuff stashed in case the urge to make the original recipe overcomes me.)

So, improvising like the best of them, I noticed a bar of fairtrade milk chocolate asking for a home:

Divine chocolate is a fabulous brand, and I am of the opinion that we should all do as much as possible to promote fairtrade brands. The divine website is great, I really recommend you visit it for all the background on their brand and also an explanation of the meaning of the West African Adinkra symbols used on the packaging. The 70% is rather good too..... So with the chocolate issue solved I decided that having modified the recipe slightly, I'd modify it again to be exactly what I wanted. The other recipe in the book that was crying out to be made was the coffee caramel cakes. So, dropping the coffee idea, but retaining the caramel (in the form of chunks added to the batter just before cooking) I set to work. (I was obviously intended to make the caramel cakes, as I'd even bought the right kind of toffees for them in the weekly shop!).

On to the recipe:

Chocolate caramel mud cakes

Ingredients

125g butter, chopped
100g milk chocolate, roughly broken
150g light muscovado sugar
90g golden syrup
160ml milk (I used semi-skimmed)
150g plain flour
50g self-raising flour
1 egg
12 Werther’s original chewy toffees, chopped into 3 each (not the hard candy ones) - NB these tend to annoyingly stick together again.

Method
- Preheat the oven to 160ºC/140ºC fan assisted, line a 12 hole muffin tin with paper cases.
- Combine butter, chocolate, sugar, syrup and milk in a small saucepan; stir over a low heat until smooth. (Make sure the heat is low, and keep stirring – I think I had my heat too high and I ended up with a few lumps that I had to blitz with a stick blender). Transfer mixture to medium bowl; cool 15 minutes.
- Whisk sifted flours then egg into chocolate mixture. Divide among cases. (NB, mixture is extremely runny – I ended up pouring it into a measuring jug in order to be able to pour it into the cases).
- Place 3 pieces of toffee into each case – I just put them on the top, with the resulting caramel explosion – if you want, push them in a bit, I was worried they’d sink, but I don’t think they would.
- Bake for about 30 minutes until cocktail stick inserted comes out clean (NB don’t insert it through a bit of toffee!!!)
- Dust with icing sugar if you want, or make a buttercream and pipe it on, or enjoy as they are!!!!!

Mmmmm, all the yummy ingredients melting together.

Just out of the oven, the cupcakes tend to dip a little as they cool - as you can see from the top picture. I love the way the caramel pieces make the cupcakes look as if they are miniature volcanoes exploding!

These were an absolute hit at work - I actually had to type out the recipe for two people, which may not sound like very many, but I usually have to fish for compliments! (I know I should probably have more confidence and try not to care what other people think, but it's nice to know the cakes are good occasionally!) so it was nice that they went down well.

They are quite sweet and sticky, so depending on how much of a sweet tooth you have, you may want to pipe a little buttercream onto them, or just dust them with icing sugar (as you can see from the photos I didn't have time for either decoration, which was a shame, but they were well received without!).