C2S Bakes: Banana & Honey Loaf

Left with some bananas that were ready to retire soon, I decided to use them and bake something instead. Browsed my numerous collection of recipe books and decided to make a banana and honey loaf recipe from the Little food collection series by Lauren Glen. I adore this series and have to say that I have the entire collection as each recipe comes with a picture of how the food should look like and the food comes out delicious.

This took me about slightly over an hour to make but is quite simple. The smell wafting from the oven as it is being baked had many eager eyes looking in that direction.

The top bit was sweet from the honey glaze and crunchy with the texture of the cake being really smooth, very light and soft. A good accompaniment for tea or breakfast.

I did not add any nuts but if you want a bit of bite to it, I think adding nuts into this will make it even better!

Continue Reading ...

C2S Bakes: Flaxseed bread

For wheat and gluten intolerants, being able to buy pastries, desserts or even a staple such as bread can prove to be a difficult task. It has gotten better over the years as supermarkets and specialist shops start stocking their shelves to meet this overlooked demand.

However, I have yet to find a combination of mass-produced non-wheat/gluten commercial bread that I love. Hence, I started making my own. The hardest bit of making this type of bread is that it doesn’t have the gluten to help the bread to rise and be fluffy like normal bread if you don’t like bread that are dense in texture like cake sometimes!

Due to a fortunate accident in the kitchen for me, I discovered how to make my bread rise slightly more to make it less dense. Every batch I make always turns out slightly different from the previous ones which makes it fun. This is a really simple recipe that takes less than an hour (including oven time!).

Here is the recipe. Hope you have as much fun baking and eating it as I do.


Ingredients


1 cup flaxseed (I ground them in a grinder first)
1 cup amaranth flour
1 tbsp baking powder
1 tbsp salt
5 eggs (beaten)
½ cup water
1/3 cup oil (I use grapeseed oil, olive oil can be too overpowering unless you love the taste of olive oil)



Preparation

1. Preheat oven to 350F/ 180C. Prepare a pan (rectangular with sides works best). As the bread doesn’t rise too much, using a loaf pan will not give it that loaf shape as this will come out to be more like sliced bread shape.

2. Mix dry ingredients.
3. Whisk wet ingredients.
4. Add wet to dry and combine well.
5. Let batter sit for 5 minutes to thicken up (not too long or the batter will become too thick to spread easily).
6. Pour batter onto pan
7. Bakes for approximately 20 minutes (until it springs back or when skewer comes out clean).
8. Allow it to cool and use a spatula to cut it into whatever size that you like.

This can be toasted which is still yummy. You can start experimenting by incorporating other flavourful ingredients like berries, fruits and chocolate. The sky’s the limit!

Continue Reading ...