Chocolate Swirl Banana Bread Trial

This recipe is from Paleo Kitchen (I don’t just cook from this book, honestly!)… It was so yummy that I’ve baked it twice this week.

The first time, the bananas weren’t terribly ripe so I stuck them in an oven for 10 minutes to soften them up, which worked fantastically. I was a bit too cautious with the ‘swirling’ in the first attempt so second time around really went for it to make sure the chocolate and cinnamon flavour was distributed throughout the cake, as you can see below!

I found the baking time needed was a bit longer than in the book (probably about an hour in my fan oven)

 

This cake is delicious. The chocolatey cinnamon richness is a little treat in the moist banana sponge. I used dark chocolate to try to keep it as Paleo-esque as possible.

I’m taking batch number two into work tomorrow. Hopefully it’ll go down a treat. I don’t think many people are going to complain when it comes down to chocolate/banana/cinnamon cake!

 

Vanilla White Peach Muffins Trial

I recently purchased The Paleo Kitchen (I highly recommend it). When flipping through the pages, the recipe for Vanilla White Peach Muffins caught my eye and glancing at the recipe list, I noticed the only thing I was missing was peaches so promptly added them to my usual weekly shop.

Unfortunately if I’d spent more time actually reading the recipe, rather than getting excited at all the new recipes I’ve found to try, I would have noticed the recipe calls for “dried white peaches”. I have never come across these before.  So I thought I’d improvise: I used regular fresh peaches and added a little extra flour and baking powder to compensate for the juice that would inevitably seep from the delicious chopped peaches.

In retrospect, next time I wouldn’t bother adding this extra flour as I think the amount of juice that came from the peaches was very small. Not to say the muffins were dry, but were perhaps a bit more coconut-y than the recipe intends. I also might not bother chopping the peaches into quite such small pieces (I went a bit overboard, and cut them into 3-5mm chunks). I think having a mouthful of muffin with a surprise big chunk of peach would be better than the  scattered ‘dots’ I have in this version.

Of course, it’s all in the eating and these were yummy, and not too dense (which I sometimes find with paleo cakes).

My current go-to naughty treat recipe is from PaleoGrubs (pumpkin and chocolate chip muffins), but these will certainly be added to the list!