test drives

It's been quite a busy, busy week for me but I managed to squeeze some baking moments into my schedule thus far.

The first is a chocolate pudding cake which has not failed me thus far and has been immensely successful wherever I bring them to. The photo doesn't do justice to this single bowl of mix and bake and then eat from it cake, but it looks rather like some moon craters or something rather than an intense piece of chocolate goodness with gooey chocolate topping. Mmm.


Following that, I learned a new recipe from a friend for a bread/scone like pastry which has only three basic ingredients as its base. I don't know what they're really called but I think I'm going to dub them Mayo Bread. They're actually quite good plain but to spice things up a bit you can do what I did as follows.

1 cup self-raising flour + 1/2 cup milk (low-fat or no fat is fine) + 2 tbs mayonnaise


After combining the above three ingredients, you can add whatever you like into the mix. I used dried fruits and sultanas in the first one and the other one has cocoa powder mixed into it and I topped the dollops of dough with a huge marshmallow on each of them.


Since they don't have any sugar at all, the dried fruits + sultanas one turned out the better batch while the chocolate + marshmallow one didn't really have much taste to them unless you liked marshmallow. The next day the marshmallow one sort of turned quite sticky and looked quite mushy to me. I don't think I'll try that one again. Perhaps chocolate chips next time.

I just baked this little beauty today and the smell is still wafting in the apartment. Absolutely lovely and I am just in love with bananas this season. They're just too cheap to miss out at my local fresh produce market and I've been stocking up on them.


These are called Monkey Bars because they're denser than the usual banana bread or cake. A bit more like a brownie like cake but with banana and chocolate chips instead. I'm pretty pleased with this, not because of the fantastic aroma and taste though they are really good, but because these don't require too much butter as well. I substituted the butter for margarine and they came out great and also the baking soda for baking powder because I didn't have any soda. I don't think the changes I made affected the bars because they taste wonderful.


Hopefully when I bring some to tomorrow's service, my friends will think that way too about the Monkey Bars. Again, my gratitude to the lovely Baking Bites for the two recipes featured today and here's to more great recipes in future!

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