Buttermilk and Banana Pancakes

Today is the day my sister returns to college, ready to start her sophomore year. My parents have the car all packed up with her things, ready for the long drive ahead of them, and she's ready to face the chilly weather of New Hampshire all over again.  I'm sending my sister off to college with a stack of banana pancakes in her belly, because what kind of sister and blogger would I be if I didn't supply hearty and delicious breakfasts, right?  It's funny that I chose to make banana flavored pancakes, of all things.  When my sister arrived home from college for the summer, I welcomed her with banana nut muffins; now that she's leaving, she's moving on with banana pancakes.  I guess my sister goes bananas for bananas. 

I happen to love baked banana treats too.  Muffins and banana bread are fantastic, and I even love a good banana cake, but I think pancakes would have to be my favorite way to work with bananas.  For some reason, they just make me think of my childhood.  I say, "for some reason," because I didn't really grow up eating pancakes.  I was a waffle-girl, 100%, and I would never trade a waffle for a pancake.  I think that whenever I did happen to have pancakes sitting in front of me, they were either of the banana or chocolate chip variety. While I can't really pinpoint how I ended up loving banana pancakes as much as I do, or why they make me think of myself as a kid, the moral of the story is that I love a good banana pancake. 

Banana Nut Muffins

These Banana Nut Muffins have been on my baking schedule for a long, long, long time.  Not this exact recipe, necessarily, but the idea of making and posting a banana nut muffin recipe has been on my mind for the past month and a half at least.  If I had had my way, I would have made and posted a batch of banana muffins a month and a half ago, but I couldn't.  I had to hold out.  These muffins were a direct request from my sister, and she demanded that I make them for her.  It's funny, because she was home for her spring break in March and her banana nut muffin craving kicked in maybe the day after she left, meaning that she (and I) had to wait until this past weekend when she came home for a random trip home to enjoy these muffins.   She mentioned these banana muffins that I promised to make for her at least three times daily since the idea landed in her head, and by the time she got home on Friday night, her texts had gone from, "I'm so excited for these banana muffins" to, "OMGAHHH BANANANANAANA MUFFFINNSS AAAHHH!!!!!!"

This was clearly a very serious craving.   

As much as I teased her for becoming so obsessed with banana nut muffins, I was secretly counting down the days I until I could make them.  I've always loved banana-flavored things, and muffins are just about one of my absolute favorite baked treats to eat.  Anything that's sweet, cakey, and without frosting is my kind of baked good, and along with simple cakes, muffins are at the top of my list. When my sister mentioned that she wanted me to make her banana nut muffins, I immediately realized that I really couldn't remember the last time I had had a banana nut muffin, and I found this upsetting.  I think I was just excited about making these banana nut muffins as she was, except that I obviously made sure to play it cool and kept my excessive excitement to myself.

Boozey Banana Crumb Cake

Ahh, at last!  At last it's beginning to feel like fall! The days are finally full of crisp breezes, the trees lining the streets in my town are beginning to change colors, and it's getting darker earlier every day.  I love this season, and am so happy that it's finally starting to feel like it!  I'm pumped, and oh so ready.  I'm itching to get in my kitchen and spend hours baking all kinds of seasonal treats.  Knowing that turning my oven on won't heat up my kitchen and make it unbearable to be in, but rather, will make it nice and toasty is such a welcome change. Cinnamon, spices, apples, and maple syrup will be the stars of all my recipes that are coming up, which is perfect because they're some of my favorite ingredients.  Pumpkin will be featured now and again, so pumpkin lovers don't need to worry.  I may not be as enthusiastic about pumpkin as most people are, but I do love a good pumpkin muffin or biscotti every now and then.  I just happen to like apple things and cinnamon things more.  In the meantime, however, it's time to appreciate something that's not necessarily a traditional fall flavor, but is still pretty damn good regardless.  Banana crumb cake.  Not just any banana crumb cake though.  This one's been spiked with rum.  Yes, it's really as good as it sounds.  Let's recount how I ended up making something that's not a conventional fall flavor during a time when I supposedly can't wait to get my fall baking started.

Considering that I have very few banana recipes on the blog, and the fact that there were suddenly several overly ripe bananas in my kitchen, I decided that it was time to take advantage of this lucky coincidence.  I'm the type of person that likes her bananas to be a bit more on the green, only slightly speckled side, so I tend to eat bananas within a few days of buying them.  As a result, I almost never, ever, ever have ripe bananas, which is a shame, because I actually really do love all banana flavored things.  Banana bread, muffins, and banana caramel cupcakes...these are all so good.  I'd post more banana flavored recipes if I had a bit more self control to let the bananas get all brown, super ripe, and sweet, but that's just not how I roll.  This time, however, three super brown splotchy, and frankly, ugly looking, bananas were in my kitchen just waiting to be used.  I had thought about making a regular banana bread, and then sprucing it up with a crumb topping and some other kind of mix-in's and flavorings, but then I figured that if I was going to go with a crumb topping, that I might as well just go all the way and make myself a really delicious crumb cake.  The flavorings were easy.  Booze, rum in this case, make all baked goods taste better, and caramelizing anything with brown sugar is a win-win situation.  

Frozen Bananas

I know I've talked a lot about my time as an architecture student here on the blog, and my discussions have usually revolved around me ranting about how little sleep I've gotten, or how much work I have left to do on a project.  While those sentiments were always true (sadly), I feel like I need to clarify that I actually really enjoyed my time that I spent in that architecture studio, and the architecture computer lab.  Sure, not getting enough sleep during the semester and falling behind on work for other classes was always stressful/annoying/inevitable, but I never really minded spending hours and hours on end working on my projects (ok, maybe I did mind every now and then).  The studio became like a second home, and even in my last semester, when I was finished with all my studio work, I still found myself studying for my very last set of finals in the architecture computer lab.  The studio space offered such a nice environment to work in, and I probably have all the friends I made within my major to thank for that.  Without each other, I'm sure staying up until 5 am on most nights would have been much less enjoyable!  The architecture department was full of crazy characters, and I'm so happy to have been able to meet them all. 

I became close friends with two of these crazy characters.  They were always speaking in some weird code; they were always finishing each other's sentences, and making each other laugh constantly, and they were always together.  I'll admit, in the beginning I found it a bit strange (ok, I actually found it really weird), but after getting to know them, they seemed totally normal (or maybe I was just getting weirder and weirder as I spent more time in studio.....).  I later learned that they were almost always talking to each other in Arrested Development quotes. If I were a normal person that actually watched television, I would have known this easily, but since I'm a television/movie deprived individual, I of course had no idea that this show existed. They were always telling me that I had to start watching, and I agreed that I would, eventually. 

Banana Caramel Cupcakes

Geeeeez, it's been a while since I've written anything on this little blog, or even taken the time to take a glance at it.  I've been unbelievably busy these past two weeks.  You see, my senior portfolio was due yesterday, at 5 PM, so in these past two weeks, I was literally in the architecture design lab every spare second I had.  I had an obscene amount of work to do to get my portfolio finished, and there were definitely moments where I thought I was just going to lose it.  Like I said in my last post, I did a pretty awful job of documenting my files from my early studio classes, so figuring out how to represent those studios in my portfolio was a bit of a challenge. That, along with more sleepless nights than I'm willing to admit to, too much take-out for dinner, too little exercise, and the stress of having to produce something that I could be proud of in the end was driving me (and I know all my classmates were probably thinking similar thoughts) crazy!  In the end though, it was all worth it.  I learned a TON of new Photoshop tricks when preparing my renderings, I feel way more comfortable working with InDesign, and produced a portfolio that, given the circumstances, I'm actually very proud of. There's definitely things I wish I could improve about it, but for my first portfolio, I think it came out beautifully, and I love it.  I also learned a very valuable lesson: DOCUMENT AND ARCHIVE EVERYTHING. Seriously, what was I thinking back in sophomore year!?

I'm actually not too terrible about documenting things in other areas of my life.  For instance, I have all my blog photos perfectly organized and stored on a giant external hard drive.  They're organized by month, and each recipe has folders for the original, unedited photos that make the cut to be posted on the blog, Photoshop files, web files, and web files that have been cropped and resized for submitting to sites like Foodgawker or Tastespotting.  Even all my academic work for school is perfectly organi...wait.  Why am I talking about my archiving tendencies.  That's boring and irrelevant and completely unimportant when banana caramel cupcakes are the topic of today's blog post, and this cupcake is staring at you in the face.  Just because I'm still sleep deprived doesn't mean that I can lose focus of my priorities.  Moving on to cupcakes!

Peanut Butter Banana Chocolate Chunk Ice Cream Sandwiches

Peanut Butter Banana Chocolate Chunk Ice Cream Sandwiches- jeez, that was a mouthful.  It's definitely the longest title I've had to use for a post, but in this case, it was totally necessary, as the title perfectly describes exactly what you see in front of you: an ice cream sandwich that has the classic chocolate chip cookie exterior updated (although in this case, let's say "upgraded") to a chocolate chunk cookie made with peanut butter and banana.  Two of these soft cookies get a a generous scoop of vanilla ice cream, a quick roll around some sprinkles, and then a trip to the freezer to firm up.  After a couple of hours of chilling, you'll have so much yummy goodness waiting for you...

I wish I could say that these ice cream sandwiches were the result of a quest to cool off on a hot summer's day, but I would be lying to you.  The weather we've been having in New York as of late has been pretty miserable.  I mean, it's been nothing terrible; it's been gray, overcast, rainy, windy, and chilly for the past week, so the weather has been very out of season.  The weather just hasn't been its usual pre-summer self.  Despite whatever has been going on with Mother Nature, these ice cream sandwiches were created nevertheless, because I wanted them to exist.

That's right.  I had a craving for homemade ice cream sandwiches and I was gonna have one, even if the weather refused to cooperate with me...so that's exactly what I did.

Avocado-Banana Smoothie

It's almost June...gahhh, how quickly time flies!  I feel like I've been home for only a couple of days, when in reality I've been at home for several weeks, which is completely crazy.  It's so hard to believe that I'll be at work at this time next week.  As excited as I am for it, I still just want to be at home in my lazy summer mode.  But alas, life is just not like that.  Going to work is just something we have to do!  It probably won't be that bad. The one thing I noticed about working everyday last summer was that it made the days go by super quickly, which was great because before you knew it, the weekend had already arrived and I was back in my summer mode, baking in the mornings and photographing in the afternoons.  Working everyday during the week ended up being a good thing, as it forced me to become organized and use my time in as productive a manner as possible.  I'm not gonna lie, but I am really looking forward to having this sense of structure once again.  

In any case though, I am going to make sure that I take full advantage of the few precious days that remain of pure summer laziness.  One of my favorite ways of doing this is by making smoothies.  With the abundance of fresh fruit that's available at this time of year, I find myself craving fruit in every shape and form, but smoothies almost always seem to win.  Sure, pies and tarts and muffins are great, but there's just something about a refreshing smoothie that just can't be beat.  It's nice to have fruit still in their raw form, unaffected by added sugar or heat.  This avocado-banana smoothie is one of my favorites.  Avocados are one of my favorite fruits (yes, they're fruits!), because they instantly give anything they're combined with beautiful color and a lovely creamy texture.  Combining them with a banana, orange juice, and some yogurt yields a perfect summer-y smoothie.

Hummingbird Cupcakes

Finals are over, at last!  Ahhh, it felt like this day would never come, but it finally did, and it was seriously about time. It's so nice to just sit back and just do nothing.  Well that’s not entirely true I suppose.  I got out of my last final exam this afternoon and did my last load of laundry and then watched more episodes of Mad Men than I’m going to admit (I’m attempting to catch up as quickly as I can, I only jumped on the Mad Men bandwagon a couple of weeks ago.  I’m already up to the middle of season three!).  I guess that’s not much to brag about, but hey, I just finished exams and I did a load of laundry...that has to count as productive right? I’m going to pretend it does.  I should technically be packing right now too, as I’m moving back home tomorrow, but let’s just say that the process is going much slower than I would have hoped...I guess that fact that I have Mad Men playing on Netflix as I pack isn’t really helping things move along.  But that’s ok, because school is over and it’s summer (sort of)!  My things will just have to pack themselves; I’m sure they’ll manage.

Mango "Colada" Muffins

We were pretty lucky this season. At least in New York, towards the tristate area, since that is the only area of the country that I can speak of with any sort of authority and credibility.  We had quite a lovely winter.  I'm serious.  The weather was surprisingly warm (I mean, "warm"), and snowfall?  Non-existant. Maybe this global warming thing isn't so bad...okok, I'm kidding. Let's not get into the whole global warming things right now.  It's too political and to be frank, I am not the least bit interested in discussing politics at 9 am on a Friday morning...or most of the time for that matter, to be perfectly honest.  I just hate having to trudge around the Columbia campus and New York City for the most part when the ground is covered in a nasty, gray blanket of "wintery-mix"...you know, that blend of sleet and snow and rain that just ends up getting super dirty on the ground...ew.  Just ew.  HOWEVER...we didn't have any of that at all this winter! Save for that really random snowfall we got on Halloween weekend, New York City was completely devoid from winter snow.  That's my kind of winter!

Manco "Colada" muffins.  I put "colada" in quotes because there's no alcohol in these muffins, which only makes sense I think.  Booze is totally alright in cupcakes, but in muffins?  Nah, that just sounds kinda strange to me I think.  But anyway.  I actually made these muffins a couple of weeks ago, while I was still at home during winter break, obviously in denial that it was actually still "winter," and I wanted to make something that reminded me of spring or even better, of summer!  Sounds like a totally legit reason to bake up some mango "colada" muffins in the middle of January right?  There was also the fact that my mom came home one day with a giant cardboard box containing something like...ten mangos.  

"Surprise! Here you go, make something with mangos!" 

"Uhhh, sure mom, ok!"  

Baked Oatmeal with Blueberries and Bananas

I am not a breakfast person.  Truly, I'm not.  That's not to say that I don't love sitting down to a plate of Belgian waffles, or a nice stack of pancakes, or even grabbing a bagel with cream cheese every now and then before class.  I just don't like eating in the morning.  I'm not really sure why; I'm just never hungry in the morning I suppose.  I do need a glass or orange juice though, that's just non-negotiable. There's that whole cliché argument that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, and I'm not about to dispute that.  I'm sure breakfast really is very important and if I ate breakfast more often, I'm sure I would have more energy during the day, or whatever those eating-breakfast-on-a-daily-basis benefits are.  I'm going to give it a shot this year though.  This is resolution #1.