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!

the oven's back with a carob coconut loaf

Good news! Our shipment finally came! Two days ago to be exact :) And the first thing I did was unpack ALL of my baking equipment and set up my beloved convection oven in my new workspace a.k.a. my bedroom. My dad was skeptical about this at first, but I finally convinced him after showing him how far away I placed the oven from my bed frame and closet, so as to not accidentally set anything on fire...

I can't explain how happy I am to be baking again! It's been about four months since the last time I legitimately baked with the oven, so I was actually a bit hesitant to begin. The numerous recipe ideas I've bookmarked in my head didn't help the cause much either.

But the hesitation easily subsided once I set my giant bowl before me--my other gadgets and ingredients positioned off to the side, bordered along the edge of my peripherals. Even with the tabbed recipes in mind, I immediately dropped my initial plan for a banana-based recipe when I came upon a shelf stacked full of cans of coconut milk at the supermarket earlier that evening. I have been--and always will be--an almond milk-type person (even though they don't sell almond milk in Taiwan *cry*), so I never really got around to trying coconut milk. I already set my mind on using carob powder no matter what I was making, and well, coconut and chocolate do complement each other...

So a carob coconut loaf it was! I highly doubted the loaf was going to taste any good because I didn't add honey. Yeah I know--extra sugar and calories and all--but I approve of honey-use since it is a natural sweetener, and just a tablespoon or two enhances the mildly sweet flavor every tasty loaf of bread needs. So I opted to melt some dark chocolate instead, even though I expected the other ingredients would mask its sweetness.