I love banana bread. It’s one of my favorite treats to make but with this recipe, it combines the best of both worlds. With chocolaty goodness and delicious banana, you can’t go wrong. The recipe is fairly simple and the longest processes is it’s baking.

With Landon’s Allergies, we can’t use nuts. So with this recipe, I added nutmeg. It give it a “nutty” flavor that is safe for us to have. I wasn’t sure, with the chocolate chips and cocoa powder how it was going to taste but the kids and my husband all really loved it.

This Banana bread is dense though. Its also rich in flavor so I cut it into slices and then cut the slices in half. I can’t wait to make this bread again!

Recently, I made my first pie ever. I used this recipe to make a chocolate pie since I had crust I needed to use. It was pretty good but my husband wasn’t a fan of the bland crust. He asked if next time I would use a sweeter crust.

While I was shopping I saw Graham cracker crumbs and grabbed a box. I was going to use the same recipe from above to make a S’mores pie but decided to try something else entirely. I’ve seen people combine brownies and cookie dough so I thought ‘why not with pie’!

The end result was this beauty.

The crust was simple as it was the recipe from the box.

Crust Recipe per crust

1¼ Cup Graham Cracker Crumbs
¼ Sugar
6 TBSP Butter, Melted

Directions

• Melt Butter, heat oven to 350°
• Mix Crumbs, Sugar and butter until crumbs are thoroughly moist
• Dump into pie pan
• Spread so pan is evenly covered
• Place in oven for 6-8 minutes
• Let cool while making brownie filling.

Next it was time to make the brownie filling. I didn’t have my own recipe for brownies. When I was searching, I was worried the one I picked would rise a little to much based on the pictures. I ended up using a variation for this brownie from Hershey’s.

Brownie Recipe(Double Batch)

2 Sticks of Butter, Melted
4 Eggs
4 TSP Vanilla
1 Cup All-Purpose Flour
1 TSP Baking Powder
1 TSP Salt
⅔ Cup Unsweetened Cocoa Powder
½ Cup Milk Chocolate Chips

Directions

• Pre-Heat oven to 350° and melt butter
• Mix Sugar, Butter, Vanilla and eggs until mixed well.
• In a separate, smaller bowl, mix flour, salt, baking powder and cocoa powder.
• Slowly add flour/cocoa mix to the ‘wet’ ingredients bowl.
• Once mixed well, fold in Chocolate Chips
• Fill pie crusts with brownie mix, you may have a little extra.
• Put in oven. Cook at 350º for 30 minutes

I baked them for only 22 minutes before I added the marshmallows but I wish I would have waited a little longer. I think the brownies would have been a little bit more done and been so good. So after the thirty minutes, you need to pull out your pies and add the Marshmallows on top. I cut a bunch of big marshmallows in half and placed them all over.

After adding the marshmallows, I put the pies back in until they had that golden/brown color. I would say to let cool for about two hours. Cut up and serve. Another way to make this would be to make some Marshmellow fluff whipped cream but that’s a recipe for another time!

Will you try this? Do you have any special pie recipes you love?

With the colder weather and Emmie’s birthday that just passed, I’ve gotten into the baking mood. Having to bake most of our sweet treats from scratch can be difficult sometimes. I mean I’ve tried a number of different cake recipes and most of them just weren’t for us.

And then I found this one. The cupcakes came out perfect and delish. Everyone loved them but I wanted to play with it a bit and add something both of the monsters adore: Bananas. I didn’t know if just doubling it and adding the banana’s would add too much moisture to them or dry them out. I slightly modified the recipe from above and came up with these delicious treats.

On Tuesday I decided to try to make a new type of muffin that I hadn’t ever made before. I usually stick with my banana or banana and chocolate chip muffins. This time though I thought I would try some fresh strawberry muffins. My sister had said something about making some blueberry ones from a package. Since we can’t make those because of potential allergen cross over and I really wanted to try something new, I decided to go with strawberries. I looked up a recipes since I wasn’t sure if my banana one would work well with these type of muffins. Although I do plan on trying them with my original recipe, I wanted to see how they should taste first.

I found an easy recipe on AllRecipes.Com. It was pretty simple and I all I did to alter it was double the recipe.

Recipe-

1/2 cup canola oil

1 cup milk

2 eggs

1 teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon and 1 teaspoon baking powder

1 cup white sugar

3-1/2 cups all-purpose flour

2 cups chopped strawberries

These were a little different in instruction than I’m used to. I usually have to put the wet ingredients in the big bowl and mix the dry in later. With this it was the opposite.

Step One

Chop Strawberries.

Step Two

Pre-heat oven to 375 degrees. Mix Oil, Milk and Egg in a small bowl. Beat lightly. Set aside.

Step Three

In a large bowl mix flour, sugar, salt, baking soda. Stir. Add strawberries to large bowl. Fold in until all the strawberries are cover in flour mixture.

Step Four

Add oil,milk, and egg mix to large bowl. Stir until mixed well.

Step Five

Line pan with paper or foil cups and fill with batter using 1/8 or 1/4 cup.

Step Six

Bake for 25 minutes. Cool for 10-15 before eating.

Some things that I did. I used a cupcake pan instead of a muffin pan. The make for the perfect sized muffins for the kids. I also suggest using the 1/4 cup when measuring out the batter. I rotated my pan 180 degrees half way through. With the cupcake pan this recipe gave me 30 strawberry muffins but again I doubled it from the original recipe.

Now on to the nutrition. Overall they aren’t too terrible a piece.

Next time I try this recipe I will be using 1/4 cup of the oil and 1/4 of unsweetened applesauce to cut down on the calories and fat. I will also be purchasing some low sodium baking powder soon because until I made this recipe and put it in to see the nutrition of them, I had no clue my baking powder had so much sodium. So if I can cut those two things these muffins will be even healthier. The kids loved them and when they are hot, they are absolutely delicious! I can’t wait to make them again!

With Christmas a week away, I need to get a move on with the yummy food. There are a couple of these that we will be trying on Wednesday since it’s my cheat day. We’ve already made the faux thin mints and they are PERFECT! I can’t wait to try more items from this list!