banana carrot loaf cake

The only thing I've been wanting to bake these days is bread. Bake a loaf of bread and you've got next-day's breakfast set and ready--which is why I love baking bread late at night :) Sadly, the oven is no longer stationed in my room :( so good-bye to falling asleep to the sweet aroma of freshly baked bread...

But that might just be a good thing--so my room won't infest with ants and all.

Anyways, instead of making bread at night like I usually do, I baked this banana carrot loaf in the morning! But that's besides the point. I'm really proud of this loaf of bread! Since I basically just threw a bunch of ingredients into a bowl and then mixed it all together, I'm rather impressed that my banana carrot loaf turned out especially well: moist, dense, spongy, and not too sweet :) Banana-based recipes usually end up with a overpowering flavor of bananas no matter what else you add in to the batter; but surprisingly, the shredded carrots have a natural tangy sweetness stronger than that of the banana, so this banana carrot loaf tastes, in a way, a lot like carrot cake!

smores

Happy December everyone! I LOVE DECEMBER because December means Christmas decorations! It's enchanting going out at night time seeing the colorful lights and wreaths and pine cones and everything you could possibly think of nailed to doors and bolted onto neighborhood welcome signs. Plus it gets even colder and everything is peppermint-ized :)

And so to kick off December I made Smores! And the best part is I actually made it from scratch (except for the chocolate)! I've had several marshmallow recipes bookmarked but most of them called for too much granulated and powdered sugar, and since I've been staying away from artificial sweeteners, those recipes would not suffice. 

 

I almost gave up searching until I came upon The Urban Poser and her recipe for paleo honey marshmallows. The recipe only called for 5 ingredients, and none of them had the word "sugar" in it :) I debated between making them peppermint flavored or cinnamon flavored, but cinnamon won. The marshmallows are fluffy and delicate, not too sweet with a trace of warm spice. Cinnamon and honey work really well together, and since it's the holidays I'll definitely peppermint-ize future marshmallow batches. 

Oh and I bought a candy thermometer! So excited to be making homemade candies from now on, no more artificial ingredients with laboratory names.

OH and a tip when making the marshmallows: if it takes you longer than 10 minutes and your mixture still hasn't thickened into marshmallow cream, DON'T FRET. It took me a good 30 minutes until my mixture actually thickened, so just be patient and you'll taste the sweet fruits of your labor ^_^

And what's a Smore without graham crackers! These grain free graham crackers are buttery, crisp, and lightly sweetened. I know, I know, I used butter. I'm making an exception. I feel like I'll be making a lot of exceptions...

cinnamon and cream cheese macarons & chocolate cupcakes

Totally kicked healthy out the window last night. I was in the kitchen 3/4 of the day yesterday, baking, trying new recipes, failing, finding new recipes, and so forth. In a few hours I'm going back to my high school to watch the annual marching band tournament that they host with another high school way down the street, so I thought I'd whip up some treats for them youngsters and my band director ^_^

Cinnamon and cream cheese is like an Americanized flavor combination of the French macaron. These macarons have a delicious, warm flavor, and the cream cheese filling balances out the sweetness of the Snickerdoodle-like shells.

When I was selling macarons about two months ago my band director had asked me to recommend a flavor to him, and I recommended these cinnamon and cream cheese macarons. He loved them! And asked me to bring in more the next time I visited him, so I made some to bring today :) 

This is completely off topic, but it's strange how quick our taste buds change and adjust to the foods we eat and don't eat. I dipped a raw almond into a bit of nutella for flavor--I haven't had nutella for about 3 weeks and now--and surprisingly I don't really like the taste of it anymore, so I just put it back in my pantry. I feel kind of sad, and yeah it is pretty shocking for anyone to reject nutella...but yeah that was pretty random huh.

cinnamon and brown sugar baked sweet potato

My entire house smells of cinnamon. It's wonderful. So warming and cozy, it makes me want to sit in front of a fire place and roast marshmallows or something; it makes me feel like drinking some Spanish hot cocoa or something.

Cinnamon evokes the holiday feel like no other even though we're nowhere near Christmas. The rich aroma takes me back to my English teacher's classroom from my junior year of high school. Every other day I had her class, and every other day walking into her classroom would be like entering a small café on Christmas Eve. It would be spring or summer and her classroom would still smell of sweet apples and warm cinnamon.