Cinnamon

Archived Posts from this Category

January 20, 2011

Cinnamon Swirl Banana Bread

Posted by itsmeangie621 under Bananas, Bread, Breakfast, Cinnamon
Leave a Comment 

Banana is my go to fruit when I want to bake, and but I don’t know what.  I’ll pick up a bunch of bananas some point in the week–have some for breakfast or a snack for a few days…and by the end of the week I have some awesomely ripe and black bananas. Perfect!  Michael knows that by the time the bananas are spotted, he knows they’re off limits to him.

I already have a go to banana nut bread recipe, but found one that was more cinnamon intensive and knew it would be perfect for my niece and nephews!  I was heading to San Francisco for MLK weekend, and wanted to bring them something a tad healthier than the Chocolate S’more Cookies (Plus I was getting over a terribly nasty cold I had been fighting for 2 weeks, so I didn’t have too much energy for anything more labor intensive).

I think that I still love my default banana nut bread recipe–but this recipe was also very, very good.  Major differences?  This recipe is much lighter on the banana flavor.  The next time I make this recipe, I may add an additional banana.  The flavors were much more subtle overall.  The saving grace to this recipe?  It’s also much a lot less sweet than my default recipe–which I actually really enjoyed.  I will be reducing the sugar in my original banana nut bread recipe the next I make it.

Cinnamon Swirl Banana Bread

good for one 9×5 loaf

  • 3 over-ripe bananas, mashed up
  • 1/3 cup unsalted butter, melted
  • 3/4 cup sugar
  • 1 egg, beaten
  • 1 tsp vanilla
  • 1 tsp baking soda
  • dash of salt
  • 1 1/2 cups flour

For the swirl:

  • 1/4 cup sugar
  • 1 Tbs cinnamon
  1. Preheat oven to 350. Butter and flour a 9×5 loaf pan.
  2. Mix bananas, butter, sugar, egg, and vanilla together. Sprinkle top of mixture with baking soda and salt. Gently stir in flour. Mix just enough to combine.
  3. In a small dish, mix together the 1/4 cup sugar and 1 Tbs cinnamon.
  4. Add 1/2 of the batter to the loaf pan and then a little more than sprinkle half of the cinnamon-sugar mixture all over the batter in the pan. Add the rest of the batter, and then sprinkle the leftover cinnamon-sugar on top.
  5. Bake for 50-60 minutes or until toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.
  6. Allow bread to rest in pan for 20 minutes before transferring to wire rack to cool.
Adapted from Lovin’ From the Oven
 

May 5, 2010

Monkey Bread–donut hole genius!

Posted by itsmeangie621 under Cinnamon, Donut, Kids | Tags: , , |
Leave a Comment 

What in the world is monkey bread and when did this get popular?  During a recent trip to Vegas, we ended up having dinner at Tom Colicchio’s Craftsteak. While the dinner was subpar for a plethora of reasons, I was really looking forward to the dessert–namely the Monkey Bread.  Why?  For one, I had no idea what that was and two, everyone raved about it. Well, continuing on with the whole “dinner was a bust” theme,  of the 7 of us there, only one other person wanted dessert…and well, we were outnumbered.

With bitterness in my heart, I set out to make this dessert.  One particular crazy Saturday, I thought it would be fun to make dinner for 6 people.  The dessert?  Monkey bread from scratch.  Afterall, if it’s not from scratch then why bother?  Of course, I didn’t factor in how time consuming 5 other dishes from scratch would be and simply fell short of time.  I was going to have to take the easy way out and used prepared products.  I was disappointed, but you get over these little bumps in no time when you’ve only had 5 hours of sleep.

Pioneer woman/Pastor Ryan, you saved me.  Yes, I made a dessert from refrigerated biscuit dough.  Ouch, ouch, ouch…I hate having to say that, but it’s true.  In the end, it was still very, very good…and if you happen to have any kids in the house, there’s no excuse for not making this.   Monkey bread is nothing more than a glorified hot bed of cinnamon sugar donut holes.  The pull and eat factor alone is fun.

Monkey Bread

What you’lll need:

3 cans Buttermilk Biscuits (Non-flaky Ones)
1 cup sugar
3 teaspoons cinnamon
2 sticks Butter
½ cups Brown Sugar
handful of candied pecans (optional)

Instructions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Open up all three cans of biscuits and cut each biscuit into quarters.

Next, combine the white sugar with 2-3 teaspoons of cinnamon. (3 teaspoons of cinnamon gives it a fairly strong cinnamon flavor. If you’re not so hot on cinnamon, cut it back to 2 teaspoons.) Dump these into a 1 gallon zip bag and shake to mix evenly.

Drop all of the biscuit quarters into the cinnamon-sugar mix. Once all the biscuit quarters are in the bag seal it and give it a vigorous shake. This will get all those pieces unstuck from one another and nicely coated with cinnamon-sugar. Spread these nuggets out evenly in the bundt pan.

At this point, you’re going to want to melt the two sticks of butter together with ½ cup of brown sugar in a saucepan over medium-high heat. This can be light or dark brown sugar. Cook butter/sugar mixture, stirring for a few minutes until the two become one. Once the brown sugar butter has become one color, you can pour it over the biscuits.  Randomly insert the candied pecans into the prepared dish.

Bake for about 30-40 minutes until the crust is a deep dark brown on top. When its finished cooking, remove it from the oven. Allow the dessert to rest in the bundt cake for another 10 minutes.  Then invert onto plate and let sit for a few minutes before removing pan.

Be very careful–mixture is very hot!

Slice or pull away at it.  Delicious!

Adapted from Pioneer Woman
 

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.