Monday Makery - Banana Bread

There's a highly recommended cookbook that we use regularly at home. It's The River Cottage Family Cookbook and it's full of simple recipes with lovely pictures
Gabe has even started sitting with the book and flicking through asking questions and requesting to do certain recipes, which fills me with joy. It has definitely become THE family cookbook and is very reliable for all the basic recipes and cooking tips.

One of our favourite recipes is the Banana Bread.  We've adapted it a little - swapping the caster sugar for Fruit Sugar and Self-Raising flour for Gluten Free Self-Raising flour so it is less likely to flare up Gabe's Ezcema.

Ingredients:

Dried Apricots 75g
Sultanas 75g
Lemon 1
Unsalted butter 100g (we use olive oil spread and it works fine)
Caster Sugar 125g (can substitute with Fruit Sugar 100g)
Eggs 2 large
Bananas 3 large ripe
Self-raising flour 200g (Gluten Free Flour can be used - Dove's Farm do a good one)

Method:

1. Preheat Oven to 160 degrees C / Gas Mark 3.  Line the loaf tin with baking parchment.
2. Chop up apricot pieces and grate the lemon zest. (we actually skipped the lemon zest bit)
3. Cream the butter and sugar with a wooden spoon until creamy.  Beat in both eggs.  Add the dried fruit and lemon zest (a squeeze of a lemon is just as good - my boy likes the 'geeezing')
4. Mash the bananas well with the fork and add to bowl.  Stir well.
5. Sift the flour into the bowl and fold into the mixture.
6. Scrape the mixture into the prepared tin.  Put into the oven for 50 mins - 1 hour.
7. When it's out of the oven leave to cool in the tin for 15 minutes before you turn it onto a wire rack.
8. Slice, grab & enjoy

It fills the house with such a delicious smell.
We always have to scoff some when it's still warm, though we know that banana bread is actually even more tasty the next day - if it lasts that long!

Thank you River Cottage Family Cookbook

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We have more Monday Makery craft & recipe ideas here.

For behind the scenes photos of Sisters Guild we have the gallery of the A-Z of Sisters Guild here.

Monday Makery - Shortbread Buttons

Children love to make pretend food with play dough making edible looking treats for their loveable soft and cuddly friends. I wanted to create the reverse turning an ordinarily inedible object into something quite scrummy. This recipe for shortbread buttons is an easy one to follow with just a few ingredients and minimal fuss saving the fun bit for designing the buttons themselves. I love baking with my girls and they love this idea. We serve them with knitted napkins straight from the sewing box and they love the trickery of it.

Ingredients:

• 250g butter at room temperature
• 75g caster sugar
• 35g rice flour*
• 335g plain flour
• 1 tbsp caster sugar for sprinkling!

 * Rice flour will give your shortbread that slightly crunchy taste. Alternatively you could replace the 35g of rice flour with 35g of corn flour for a delicate melt-in-your-mouth texture. The recipe is quite versatile and if you have neither Rice flour nor corn flour just use ordinary plain flour instead. I promise it will still work.

1. Preheat the oven to 150C or 130C for fan assisted. Grease oven trays or line with greaseproof paper.
2. Mix the soft butter and sugar in a bowl until its smooth, its quite hard work so you might want to use an electric mixer.
3. Stir in the remaining dry ingredients and mix until you have a dough.
4. Knead the dough on a floured surface.
5. If you'd like to make different colours and add different flavours separate the dough into small bowls. Add a few drops of your colour depending on how strong you want the colour to be, and knead the dough until so the colour works it way through.
6. Using a round cutter (about 5cm) sprinkle it with flour, place on the baking tray. Take a tablespoon of dough and fill the cutter using the back of the spoon to smooth it. Repeat with the remaining dough using flour on the cutter to prevent it from sticking.
7. Take a lid from a plastic water bottle and push down gently on top of each dough circle. This will make the indentation for the buttons. Now use a skewer or chopstick to make the button holes and a fork to make patterns on the edges. 
8. Sprinkle the buttons with a little caster sugar and bake for 30 minutes or until they feel firm to touch. Cool them on the trays. I tried removing mine too early once and as they were not yet cool they fell apart! Be patient. 
9. Once cooled you can add any further decoration, dip the sides in melted chocolate, or drizzle patterns of chocolate or icing over the top. 

 This should make about 26 buttons but that'll depend on how much you eat as you're going!

If you would like to give each set of buttons a different flavour you might like to add some chocolate chips or try adding a little (1tsp) espresso powder for a coffee flavour. To make stripy buttons you could try dipping the sides of the buttons into melted chocolate! We like to add orange and lemon zest to our yellow buttons for a little zing. Quite often I'll let the girls choose the flavours. Trying to match a flavour to a colour. Cinnamon is a warm taste so this works well with the red buttons. They like being inventive and occasionally we end up with a winner. The point is the recipe is so very easily varied with colour and flavour once you've got a little experimental with them you'll see how fun they are to make and truly scrumptious to eat too.

These make great birthday party treats. We made them as part of our Alice in Wonderland party where everything is not as you would think.