Earl Grey and Cardamom Banana Bread

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A floral spin on the classic banana bread. This thick, moist banana bread is filled with bright citrus zest, herbal earl grey tea, and cardamom.

Well, it’s winter. As I’m writing this, my weather app is telling me that it is currently 3° F outside and tomorrow the high is 0° F. ZERO. I’m still working on wrapping my little Florida head around this whole sub-zero winter weather. I’ve discovered that as long as you bundle up really well and spend most of the time indoors, it’s not terrible. I also have found that I love the sparkly blanket of snow that covers the ground and even the big flakes that fall from the sky every few days. And I’ve also discovered that a thick, warm loaf of banana bread makes it a lot better.

I’m always looking for ways to slightly fancy up the classic banana bread. I want to add subtle flavors that will add depth and interest, without completely changing the tried and true banana bread that I know and love. This little flavor riff is a real winner. I know this because normally, when I play with banana bread, Martin’s response is always that “it’s good” and he “really likes it” but he still “just prefers the regular banana bread”. But not with this one! I made it a couple of times, tweaking the recipe slightly each time, until on this current iteration, Martin decided that it was his “favorite banana bread I’ve ever made”. So there you go. It’s a raging success.

how to make earl grey and cardamom banana bread

This is my basic banana bread recipe, because if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.

We start by creaming butter with sugar and brown sugar, but this time, we’re also adding a smattering of orange zest, a fair amount of ground cardamom, and dried earl grey tea. (Just buy a box of earl grey and slice open the tea bags to get loose ground tea). We’re going to add all of these flavor components in this first step because creaming any sort of flavor additive (like zest, or extract) allows for the oils in them to coat the fat in the butter resulting in a more assertive and evenly-distributed flavor.

When the butters, sugars, and aromatics are thick and creamy, we’ll add mashed, ripe bananas, egg yolks, vanilla, and sour cream (or yogurt) for extra moisture. Then we add our dry ingredients—flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt and mix until we have a thick, smooth batter.

Finally, we whip our egg whites. Whipping egg whites and then folding them gently into the batter will create more rise and leavening in our bread.

A little science lesson:

Rise in baked goods comes from three different sources: air, steam, and chemical leaveners (like baking powder and soda). In this recipe, we use both chemical leaveners, but the baking soda’s main job is to react with and balance the acidic ingredients in the recipe (bananas and sour cream). The baking powder is there to actually help the bread rise. By creaming the butter, we are incorporating air into the batter and coating each of the sugar granules in fat, suspending them in the batter. Then, when the bread is baking and the sugar begins to dissolve, there will be steam released that will also aid in rising. So by folding in whipped egg whites, we are adding yet another layer of leavening (air and steam) which will leave us with a final product that is both hefty and dense (like the banana breads we know and love), but also a light with a finer crumb.

After folding in the egg whites, we transfer the batter to a loaf pan, sprinkle on a layer of crunchy demerara sugar and bake it off. Cooling the banana bread completely in the pan will help form that sticky top layer, which is the very best part in my opinion. Smear thick slices with Kerrygold butter and a little sprinkle of Maldon, curl up on your couch, and embrace all of the coziness you can in this frigid winter season.

Browned Butter and Walnut Chocolate Chip Cookies

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Thick and chewy chocolate chip cookies filled with nutty browned butter, toasted walnuts, and puddles of dark chocolate. The best simple chocolate chip cookie recipe.

New year, new cookies! You can never go wrong with the classic chocolate chip, and this week, we’re making them my very favorite way—with toasty walnuts, a little rye flour, and browned butter, aka, maximum nuttiness.

We spent last weekend disconnected from the entire world in an adorable little Getaway cabin in the woods of Northern Minnesota. We locked our phones away and spent the weekend roasting marshmallows, cozy-ing up with good books, and teaching ourselves all sorts of two-person card games. Oh, and we cooked. Cabin cooking was such a fun little challenge for me as I prepped like a mad woman before we left on Friday afternoon and played a very intense game of cooler Tetris to get all of my tools and ingredients in as few bags as possible.

I brought along my dutch oven and the theme of the weekend was flavorful, not-boring meals that you can make in one pot. We had great success! I made a roasted potato, rotisserie chicken, and kale hash loaded with lots of bright dill and charred lemons and a blistered tomato, shallot, white bean and sausage stew that we sopped up with crispy pieces of bread. And I made these cookies.

I used this little getaway as an opportunity to test this recipe one more time “for quality control purposes”, ya know? And good thing I did because I completely ruined them. I don’t know if you’ve seen it on the interwebs, but there is this trick where you put flaky salt on the bottom of the cookie before baking instead of sprinkling it on top afterwards so that the salt will stick better. I thought to myself, “Wow, what a smart idea. I’ll definitely do that!” except instead of flaky salt I was using ultra-coarse vanilla infused French grey salt and instead of doing a little sprinkle number, I decided to do sort of a pressing situation resulting in far too much salt. Like inedible saltiness. So we sat in our cute tiny cabin and used a butter knife to slice off the tops of the cookies and ate them like little cookie bites.

But don’t worry! I made them one more time when we got home and went back to my tried and true sprinkle method and they were perfect and delicious and possibly one of the best cookies I’ve made in a long time. Moral of the story, don’t try everything you see on the internet…except for these cookies. You should definitely try these, they’re very good!

how to make browned butter chocolate chip cookies

These cookies are great because they are super straight forward in the methodology, but still pack a bit of a flavor punch (through our walnut + browned butter + rye flour trio). Here’s how you make ‘em!

  1. Toast the walnuts! Toasting your nuts for just 5 minutes or so creates malliard browning, which is a reaction between heat and proteins (not sugar, that’s caramelization) that makes brown food brown and imparts that “browned” (aka toasty and delicious) flavor. When you toast your nuts, you’re adding an entirely new depth of flavor so pop them in the oven for a few minutes while you prep the rest of your ingredients.

  2. Brown the butter. Browning butter is one of the simplest and most effective ways to add flavor to baked goods. When you brown butter, you are simply cooking it until the milk solids begin to caramelize. Put your butter in a saucepan and set it over medium heat, swirling it every minute or two while it melts. You will continue to cook it as it melts, bubbles, and then begins to foam. When the foam begins to subside, you should be able to see little amber flecks forming on the bottom of the pan and the butter should smell really fragrant (like toasted nuts and vanilla and magic). At this point, quickly remove the butter from the heat and transfer it to another bowl to stop the cooking and let it cool to room temperature.

  3. Make the cookie dough. For this recipe, we’ll mix the cooled browned butter and sugars until wet and sandy and then add eggs and vanilla to help homogenize the batter. Next comes dry ingredients, followed by walnuts and chocolate.

  4. Chill the dough. This recipe only needs about 30 minutes of chilling time. You can definitely chill the dough longer if you’d like but the cookies won’t spread quite as much and they will be more round than flat. You can read all about why we chill our cookie dough here!

A Collection of Christmas Cookies

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It’s Cookie Week around here which simply means that we’re spending the whole week talking about cookies and only cookies. If you haven’t checked out Monday’s brand new biscotti recipe, hop on over and give it a read and add them to your cookie baking list too.

Christmas cookies are especially fun to make (and enjoy) because usually, they are little crunchy works of art. Here are a few of my very favorite holiday cookie recipes from the blog.

You can go directly to each of these recipes by clicking on the corresponding photo.

And because any cookie can be a Christmas cookie if you just believe, you can browse all of my cookie recipes here.