Holiday Goods - Goodies

So as promised, the kitchen saw a decent amount of action for Christmas and thanks to the awesome knives, an extraordinary 20-year-old Singer hand blender, the patience of wonderful roommates and the awesome food markets which Astoria has to offer, somehow this holiday season was definitely delicious but more so educational than anything else... as I quickly learned today while getting back into Bikram yoga post-holiday-eating.

What do we learn from cooking, really?

Food in general, we learn a lot from, yes. But cooking, as we've come to see, is something that we have to learn, practice, experiment with, perhaps even be prepared to throw it all away if it's not  what we wanted it to be. Needless to say though, there has to be SOME joy in doing it, shouldn't there be?

But here was my own personal cookin craze for Christmas 2009...

COCOA BANANA CAKE w/ PEANUT BUTTER BUTTERCREAM FROSTING

&

COCOA BANANA MUFFINS

I actually got the recipe for Cocoa Banana muffins from a parent of a student of mine last year, mostly because she brought them to school and I went BALLISTIC over them. What can I say? I've only recently in my adult life come to appreciate bananas in combination with something other than sliced in my cereal.

So as the story goes... having a bunch of overripe, blackened bananas in the freezer due to laziness and neglect (originally intended to be baked months before when the feeling hit me) I finally took them out one day and decided not only to bake a bunch, but perhaps dish them out as gifts this year.

Here is another tip: I have decided although I absolutely adore Ghiradelli chocolate with my life, I'm going to try to stick with Hershey baking cocoa. Is it the dutch-processing that makes all the difference? I don't know what it is, but everytime I've tried to bake with Ghiradelli cocoa I fail somehow. If anyone has any tips for me on that one I'd be ever so grateful. Regardless, I made a compromise and sprinkled Ghiradelli cocoa on top of the buttercream at the end. Everybody wins.

 Long story short, the first dozen actually ended up being rather tasteless (along with the cake) due to what I was going to conclude was a bit of lacking on the sugar part... Thank God I was the jerk that dipped her finger into the batter to have a taste and thus saving me from having another dozen of tasteless Cocoa Banana goods.

(special thanks to the lovely assistant cook in the kitchen, E, for preventing me from going beserk)

Henceforth, this is where the Peanut Buttercream frosting comes in (another appreciation built in my adult life which I wish I'd eaten earlier in life = Peanut Butter & Bananas). 

The stuff needed to have a little more umphf, period. I couldn't give bad muffins, let alone the ones that are just too underestimated in their delight factor.

So a few sticks of butter, confectioners sugar, and peanut butter later, voila. The sweet-challenged goods were sweetened enough to give and from what I'm told, they were enjoyed.

(as for whether or not they were thrown in the garbage shortly after, that shall really just be their little secret)

However, we were lucky in being able to give them out. Particularly the day our monthly exterminator came to spray our apartments in the building, and I just gave him the last six and said "Merry Christmas".

On that note ...

Onto Holiday Feastin'

& trying to create charisma out of chaos in the Creation Station