The Best Banana Bread

I posted a picture of some amazing banana bread that I had made on Instagram and promised to post the recipe. That was.....quite a while ago. My follow-through isn't always the best but the intentions are good!

Anywho, I'll keep this short. This bread is super easy and a definite crowd-pleaser. So get at it! :)

Bananas are mushed, Earth Balance butter is creamed with sugar, and homemade (by my aunt) vanilla joins the party. Then add bananas.

Sifted dry ingredients added, stopping to scrape once or twice. 

Thick batter goes into the prepared pan. I like to use parchment that hangs over the sides for easy removal and clean up. 

And into the oven! That easy. 

And there's the end result! Yummy. I'm about to go eat some, in fact. 

Here's the recipe so you can make your own and resist the urge to eat the whole loaf, slice by divine slice. 

The Best Banana Bread

recipe found in my mom's recipe box, origins unknown

2 large bananas, smushed with a fork

1 stick Earth Balance butter

1 cup granulated sugar

1 tsp vanilla extract

2 cups All-Purpose Flour

1 tsp Baking Soda

1/4 tsp salt

chopped nuts, if desired

Mush your bananas in a bowl. Cream your Earth Balance with sugar until light and fluffy. Add vanilla and bananas. Sift dry ingredients together and add to mixing bowl. Scrape bowl and paddle. Mix only until flour is no longer visible. Do not over mix! Add nuts if desired. Pour/scrape the thick batter into a greased and parchment-lined 9"x5" loaf pan and spread evenly.

Bake at 325F for about an hour, until a toothpick comes out clean. Cool slightly in the pan and then remove and let cool on a cooling rack to avoid sweating. That's what sometimes makes banana bread overly moist on the bottom. Slice and enjoy! I like to eat it with a smear of more Earth Balance. :)

Overnight Orange Sweet Rolls

Sometimes, I am struck with genius. Also mixed with a dash of lazy in the form of wanting to have breakfast almost ready when I wake up. That's how these amazing Orange Rolls came about! I was trolling through my breakfast Pinterest board and saw a recipe for Orange Monkey Bread (which I always thought was a strange name, by the way),  but I had this desire to make it easier as well as using ingredients I already had. And meanwhile making it vegan, of course. :) So here was the result! It's surprisingly easy. In fact, I think the hardest part is zesting the orange and squeezing out the juice. Serious labor, for sure.

So! First comes the prep the night before, which shockingly I didn't think to photograph at 11pm. I'm a hard-core night owl, especially when I don't work the next day. That night consisted of waiting until almost midnight to prep the rolls so I could sleep in somewhat, but not enough to allow the rolls to get CRAZY big and impossible to bake.

ANYWAY.

Midnight, or thereabouts, I took my frozen Rhodes rolls (see? I told you. Easy.), let them defrost slightly and then dipp them in a mixture of orange juice & melted Earth Balance vegan butter followed by orange zest rubbed into granulated sugar. Each of those rolls then went into a greased bundt pan and then hung out on my counter under a towel all night.

The result the next morning:

WHOA, BABY. 

Yeah, I slept in a little but they're not monstrous enough that I'm too worried about baking them. Speaking of which, with my freakishly hot oven, the top (but eventual bottom) of the rolls got a little dark, but gratefully with the glaze and freshness of the roll, they still taste all sorts of incredible. 

BAKED ROLLS. 

I waited a few minutes and then flipped the rolls onto a large plate, pulled off the pan and HALLELUJAH, the heavens rejoiced. 

I whipped up the glaze and drizzled it alllll over that sucker. And then I devoured them. Well...not all, but quite a few of them. ;) Evidence:

The first of many rolls enjoyed. While still warm, of course. 

 LOOK HOW PRETTY:

Heavenly. 

If you choose to make these rolls, just be prepared to use a lot of restraint to not eat the entire pan yourself. 

Overnight Orange Sweet Rolls

Adapted from Six Sister's Stuff

1 1/4 cups granulated sugar

1 Tablespoon grated fresh orange zest

1/3 cup orange juice

1/4 cup Earth Balance butter, melted

18 Rhodes frozen dinner rolls, left out for about 10 minutes

 

Glaze:

1/4 cup Earth Balance butter, melted

1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 Tablespoon almond milk (more or less depending on desired consistency)

1 cup powdered sugar 

Grease a 10-inch bundt pan with nonstick cooking spray.  In a small bowl, combine sugar and orange zest by rubbing it in with your fingers.  In a separate bowl, combine orange juice and melted butter.  Dip each roll in the orange juice mixture, roll in sugar mixture and place in prepared pan.  Pour remaining orange juice mixture over the rolls. 

Cover pan with a clean kitchen towel and allow rolls to rise overnight, but no more than 8 or 9 hours depending on how warm your kitchen gets. In the morning, preheat the oven to 375F and then possible go back to bed for 10 minutes while it heats up, but maybe that's just me. 

Bake rolls for 25-30 minutes, or until golden brown. Cool rolls in pan for about 5 minutes and then invert pan onto a large plate or platter. Remove bundt pan.  To make glaze, whisk melted butter, vanilla, almond milk and powdered sugar together until combined.  Top with glaze and enjoy!! 

The Best Vegan Biscuits

You know when you want something bread-y and warm and comforting, but making actual bread sounds like way too much work? Welp. Here you go. Buttermilk biscuits! Vegan, of course. I make these biscuits every couple weeks and crave them basically all the time in-between. : ) They go really well with my Throw-together Chili, which is a post I've been meaning to do but it's not so much a recipe as "Let's-see-if-I-have-enough-stuff-in-my-cupboard-and-fridge-to-make-it-yummy", meaning it changes every time.   ; )

But the biscuits! Those do indeed have a recipe. 6 ingredients, 1 bowl, 30 minutes, DONE. Slather them with Earth Balance butter and Agave and just devour. Or with chili. You really can't lose either way. Here we go!

These babies are golden and gorgeous! 

I love how simple biscuits are. Cut in the butter (or Earth Balance) until crumbly, add liquid, mix, and just press it into a good thickness on a floured surface and cut circles. Easy peasy. The only real trick is not the over handle the dough. And I've been told to NEVER use a rolling pin. That's a no-no. If you can't work it with just your hands, then something ain't right. 

Here's that chili I was talking about with some biscuits. Beautiful. 

The Best Vegan Biscuits

from Minimalist Baker

• 2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
• 1 Tbsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 3/4 tsp sea salt
• 4 Tbsp non-dairy, unsalted butter (I use Earth Balance)
• 1 cup unsweetened PLAIN almond milk + 1 Tbsp fresh lemon juice

1. Preheat oven to 450 degrees F.
2. Whisk dry ingredients together in a large bowl.
3. Add cold butter and use fingers or a pastry cutter to cut the butter into small pieces. Make sure your butter is cold. 
4. Make a well in the dry ingredients and, using a wooden spoon, stir gently while pouring in the almond milk mixture. Still until just combined. Dough will be sticky. 
5. Turn onto a lightly floured surface, dust the top with a bit of flour and then very gently turn the dough over on itself 5-6 times - hardly kneading.
6. Form into a 1-inch thick disc, handling as little as possible.
7. Use a 1-inch thick dough cutter or any round cutter ( honestly, I just used a cup.) Press it straight down and twist. Repeat and place biscuits on a baking sheet in two rows, making sure they just touch - this will help them rise uniformly. Gently reform the dough and cut out one or two more biscuits - you should have 7-8.
8. Next brush the tops with a bit more of melted non-dairy butter and gently press a small divot in the center using two fingers. This will also help them rise evenly, so the middle won't form a dome.
9. Bake in a 450 degree oven for 10-15 minutes or until fluffy and slightly golden brown. Serve immediately. Let remaining biscuits cool completely before storing them in an airtight container or bag.

And that's it! So just make it happen. Leftovers are a beautiful thing, too. I like to get creative, like so:

That is some Chickpea "Tuna" Salad on those amazing biscuits. Dang. That was GOOD. 

Whew. So go make some vegan biscuits! : )

 

Fresh Start and Intro

Source

Hello! Whew. This feels weird. I've had my other blog for, uh....wow. 7 years. Which is culinarycontessa.blogspot.com , if you care to know. I intended for it to be a food blog, but I basically failed at that. It really had no direction and evolved so many times as I changed and got older that the description really means very little now. So I'm gonna keep this one simple! A picture or two, recipe and source, if applicable, and a description of what I did or what I changed. Sound good? Cool.

But first! A bit about me, if you're coming here for the first time. I am 27 years old. Single White Female (not the movie. Haven't seen it, but pretty sure it's a bad thing). Go by the name of Anika (which rhymes with Monica). I graduated in culinary arts about 6 1/2 years ago and have mostly worked in baking since then. Sweets have always been a passion, but I've expanded my cooking horizons since I've been living on my own and cooking for myself. I became a vegetarian on a whim after reading this book. Actually began as vegan, sorta, but I really had no clue what I was doing, so I pulled back to vegetarian, which worked to start with. And I held strong for over 4 years! But there was always that nagging at the back of my mind. Stopped drinking cow's milk, started with soy but once I discovered Almond Milk? Pff. I was a goner. That stuff is amazing. No joke. People asked me about eggs. "Aren't those meat, too?" Ehhhhhhh. I didn't have a good answer, really. It's amazing what we can rationalize when we don't want to see the truth.

BUT. Mine eyes have seen the glory of a fully vegan life! (Yes, that was typed to the tune of "Battle Hymn of the Republic" ; ) )  It began earlier this year when I started feeling SUPER crappy basically every day. I suspected an allergy, but wasn't sure to what. Gluten? Nah. Tree nuts? PLEASE NO!! Had to go off Almond milk for that experiment. Horrible. But I ruled that out. Phew! But... dairy. That was possible. My dad is Lactose Intolerant, so I asked what his symptoms were. They sounded scarily similar. Dang. I'm quite the cheese-lover. But I tried to cut most things out. Milk, already gone. Cheese, found a good substitute (more on that later). No ice cream. But items with cultures like sour cream and yogurt didn't seem to bother me, so they hung around a bit longer. It did make me think, though. What was stopping me from making that jump to vegan? My stomach clearly didn't want dairy anymore. I only ate eggs a few times a month, if that. So? I did what I always do: research.

Seriously, I love research. One of the few things I miss about school. I love learning new things. In fact, I love knowing things in general. So I tried a few vegan recipes. Read some blogs. Scrolled through Pinterest, of course. And I checked out "The Kind Diet" by Alicia Silverstone from the library. It's about time, too! It's a pretty great book. I'm not quite a "superhero" yet, but maybe someday. : )  So, that lead to more books and reading. An amazing podcast called "Food for Thought" hosted by the great Colleen Patrick-Goudreau. Fantastic. I love her. She has amazing books as well. The information is all there! It's everywhere, in fact. But we as humans have somehow learned to completely tune it out. So I learned all I could and I told myself I was "transitioning" to vegan, but really, once the decision was made, it became harder and harder to eat those certain things. I'd say it's been about a month since I became "officially" vegan. I put that in quotes since veganism is not a destination, but a continuous journey. I'm not sure if someone else said that first or not, but it sure sounds good either way ; ) . But it's true. You don't just reach this place where vegan is where you are, what you are, and all you are. We don't work that way. Humans are always moving, changing, growing. I still have so much to learn and have enjoyed everything so far.

Sorry, perhaps you can tell that I can be exceptionally long-winded. Most posts won't be like this! I just have wanted to write about this new change for the longest time. Anyway. Recipes coming!

 p.s. I'm still quite the newbie so if I happen to screw something up, feel free to let me know. I would appreciate any feedback, in fact! Just keep it positive. Here we go! : )