Classic Banana Bread from Cooking Light

I don’t think I’m going to find a better recipe for my brokeness. I’d been wanting to make banana bread all summer (er, for a few weeks, technically) because I could make it on a Sunday or Monday and it would last through the whole week, and I’d basically only have to buy bananas and yogurt because all the other ingredients are basic baking staples. This fulfilled all my dreams. It was super filling, lasted a week, and buying ingredients cost less than two dollars!

I made this a couple of weeks ago and I already miss having it in my fridge when my stomach is grumbling at 10 o’clock at night, so I grabbed some bananas at the grocery store today. 

Raspberry-Plum Tart with Hazelnut Crust

A friend and I wanted to make something unnecessarily complex, hence this. We originally found the recipe here on Smitten Kitchen, but we saw that it was adapted from Martha Stewart’s recipe, and I am basically one of her disciples, so we used the original instead. Baking it was certainly an adventure:

• we didn’t have a food processor so we crushed the hazelnuts with a metal measuring cup
• we bought two packages of raspberries only to find that half of each was moldy—good thing we only needed the equivalent of one?
• I didn’t have a springform pan so we used an 8 by 8 square cake tin, which meant it had to cook forever because it was thicker than it was supposed to be.

Crazy delicious in the end, though. Maybe a bit of a hot day to have had the oven on in an apartment with no AC for over an hour…

Rainbow Cakes in a Jar!

The recipe’s from here, though I used Martha Stewart’s white cake recipe because I don’t like making things that aren’t from scratch. I found the recipe a bit stressful, but that was just because it involves seven eggs whites, and beating and folding egg whites is just nerve-wracking for me because I’m always afraid I’ll get some yolk in with the white and they won’t stiffen, or that I’ll somehow fold them in incorrectly and the air won’t be trapped in like it’s supposed to be. Also I was kind of in a rush when I was making these.

But anyway, they turned out beautiful and delicious. I was giving them as a gift so I didn’t get to eat much—just the part I cut off the top to put the frosting in. I wanted to keep one for myself, though.