red velvet cookie attempt

My child asked for Red Velvet cookies as a snack for having friends over to watch a horror movie. The RED is an important part here. You know, like blood. 

So I did the thing where I didn't really follow the recipe and am now disappointed. At least I'm self aware? 

I didn't have a printed recipe in any of my cook books - not even the ones which are expressly just cookies. 

So I browsed recipes online. One with high ratings and good reviews was essentially a chocolate cookie recipe I've had for a long time, but with red. It suggested liquid dye, gel, or beet root powder. I thought that sounded fun, so I ordered the powder. And asked my husband to pick up white baking chips from the store.

I used margarine, set in the bowl overnight. I used the cocoa powder substitution for baking chocolate, as I've always done. No buttermilk, so I used coconut milk rather than water. Put in the beet powder with the flour. Hand stirred the "white cream morsels" in at the end. 

Used the little scoop tool to plop them on the baking tray. 

They needed the full 10 minutes. See this one? I tried to take them out at 8 minutes and it was NOT ready. 

They taste good. Cookies a success, but red velvet they are not. 

Banana Bread (post #2)

A long while back I posted about baking banana bread, but I didn't include a lot of details and I didn't have all of the ingredients I normally use. So, post #2!

For baking today, because I always make a giant mess and I need to leave my house this afternoon (and I'd rather do that without flour all over my new black pants!) I donned my great grandma's very long apron. It goes almost all of the way down my legs. 

That's kind of a terrible picture, but see how long it is?!

This is the recipe I use. Followed pretty exactly this time - only changes were type of milk, no nuts, and way more chocolate - an entire bag of dark chocolate chips. 

Early stages! I didn't let the butter soften as much as it should have, so it looks more crumbly than creamy...

Isn't this the most adorable measuring cup ever? Used Vanilla Almond Milk instead of dairy. I don't even notice a difference in something like this. We typically have skim, almond, and coconut milks in the house these days! The almond goes the most slowly, so I so tend to use it for baking. 

We were out of normal table salt, so I used sea salt for this loaf. 

I always think the batter looks a bit like puke. Not as chunky this time, because my bananas were super ripe and also pretty bruised up (apparently my family thinks that if they mistreat the bananas, I will bake bread sooner) so they mashed up pretty smoothly. I also put in a whole bag of dark chocolate chips, because we love chocolate. I like the flavor of the dark chips in the banana bread best out of what I've tried. 

58 minutes in the oven and it's nicely browned. I put it in for 55, but the toothpick test said it wasn't done yet. 3 more minutes and it looks perfect!

Okay. It was actually a little overdone around the bottom edges. 

But it was chocolatey and delicious anyway.