Junk inside your trunk

This week's recipes are high in fat, sugar and all things bad for your body but heavenly for your taste buds.

Some days I feel like exercising restraint on my diet by feeding it with healthy foods, other times I feel like abusing it with cookies, cakes and chips.

Today feels like the latter.

Nat and I had a Gossip Girl marathon and proceeded to consume chocolates, popcorn, chocolate caramel biscuits, Tim Tams, carrot cake, chocolate fudge Pop Tarts and chips. In addition to this, I've had white chocolate Kinder Bueno, Lindt dark chili chocolate, Lindt dark roasted almond chocolate and chocolate buttercream cake in the past 2 days. 

I still feel like doing my digestive system some more damage. These recipes would be a good start.

Pretzel Cookies with Chocolate and Peanut Butter Chips

From Sugar Cooking

Oh peanut butter chips, why won't you come to New Zealand?! I long for you so. Nat and I were having a debate over whether sweet and salty was a good combination. She said no, I said yes.

Mini Turtle Brownie Bites

From The Other Side of 50

Another topic Nat and I debated about over episodes of Gossip Girl was caramel. Turns out Nat doesn't like caramel. I've only recently began to form a liking for it. Either way, chocolate brownies with caramel sauce sounds damn good.

Snickers Caramel Cheesecake Cookies

From Picky Palate

The words in this recipe sound good on their own but better when strung together in a sentence. 

Peanut Butter Honey Brownies

From Spoonful of Sugar

You can't have junk food without peanut butter of some kind. In this recipe it's in the form of brownies with a honey filled centre. I like to think the healthiness of the honey offsets the calorific nature of everything else in the brownies.

Baked Doughnuts

From How to Eat a Cupcake

 

Funny how this is the only recipe of the ones listed that I'm actually excited to make. The reason being is that I can finally make doughnuts without using a fryer! I've come to believe that baking is a healthier method than frying, so these baked doughnuts sit on top of my list of things to bake in the near future.  

I feel like I've gained ten pounds just blogging about junk food. I've got to feed the fat kid inside of me!

Banana-ful bread

We had just finished our peanut butter and chocolate chip cookies and being the intrepid (or maybe just greedy) bakers that we are, decided to raise another sweet creation from the oven and this is it in all it's brown glory:

(okay, maybe the picture doesn't do it justice- but we like to blame it on the camera, sun, wind, and the moisture from the air rather than admit we're bad photographers)

Wonderfully moist and banana-ey!

Egg-Free Banana Bread
(Adapted from this recipe)
Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup butter/margarine
• 3/4 cup organic cane sugar
• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp sea salt
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1 large ripe banana
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 2 tbsp milk
• 1 tbsp honey (or as much as you like)

Method:

1. Preheat oven to 160° C.
2. Lightly grease 8 x 4 bread loaf pan.
3. Cream butter (or margarine) and sugar in large bowl.
4. Slowly sift in flour, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon.
5. Mash banana in separate bowl and then add in to large bowl and mix.
6. Add vanilla extract.
7. Pour batter into greased pan.
8. Bake for 60 minutes or until knife comes out clean.
9. Allow to fully cool before slicing.

Print-friendly version of recipe here.

And voila, the awesome-est banana flavour you'll ever taste! We only used one banana and even people who do not monkey about with their criticism showed much appreciation for this amazing burst of flavour ie. Jade's dad.