But I also wanted to make something different--I had made a lot of chocolate and lemon-based things recently, and I wanted a different ingredient to be the focus of my next project. My ingredient of choice? Coconut! What's the first thing that comes to mind when I hear coconut? Macaroons. The next thing? Caramel de Lites. Hopefully, M will make these for her site one day so I can try making them myself... :)
My friend the Foodie also happens to be a super baker, and he told me that he turns to Joy of Baking for recipes. So after looking up macaroons on the site, I found a recipe that fit the bill, and another one that gave the macaroons a chocolate ganache accent. My apartment was much too hot, and my friends and I were much too tired--so we decided, 'Out with the ganache, and in with the melted chocolate chips.'
The results of the baking? Two great successes! The banana bread was fantastically moist, and the aromas of the banana really got the Panda antsy (in a good way). The macaroons were sweet and coconutty, and I think the chocolate was a great touch. When I was baking, I dunked those bad boys in a thick layer of chocolate, and then set them back on the parchment paper. My fridge is pretty packed, so I didn't have room to refrigerate the entire pans. Next best thing? Get some bags of frozen vegetables and stick them underneath your baking pans. Works like a charm. The macaroons and their little chocolate bottoms peeled off easily.
What did both of these recipes have in common? Joy! (I know, I'm very punny. But does it count as a pun if one's a proper noun? Is it even a pun? I'm not sure.) So have some friends over, and bake (preferably in a well air-conditioned apartment).
Banana Bread (adapted from Joy the Baker)
Ingredients:
3 large bananas (or 4 medium bananas)
1/3 cup of melted butter
1 cup of light brown sugar
1 beaten egg
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp baking soda
1 pinch of salt
1 tsp cinnamon
1 + 1/2 cup of all purpose flour
Will make 1 loaf of banana bread
Recipe:
0. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
1. Combine the bananas in a large bowl.
2. Add the butter and sugar. Mix together.
3. Beat one egg (oh, that sounds violent too.) Add it to the large bowl.
4. Add the vanilla and cinnamon. Mix together well.
5. Add the baking soda ans salt. Mix well.
6. Add the flour. Mix well (this probably comes as no surprise by this point).
7. Butter (canola oil works just as well) and flour a loaf pan. For this step, I used a 9''x5'' pan, and the loaf was kind of short (but still delicious!). This recipe is probably suited more for a 8''x4'' pan, which I didn't have.
8. Pour the mixture into the loaf pan (it should take up approximately 1/2 of the pan's volume). Bake for 1 hour. If you insert a utensil (I choose the chopstick) into the loaf, it should come out clean.
9. Let the bread cool.
10. Remove bread from pan and serve!
As a note: When my friends and I baked it, I had accidentally set the oven for 325 degrees Fahrenheit (which is the temperature for the macaroons), but the bread still turned out fine after 1 hour in the oven.
Chocolate-dipped Coconut Macaroons (adapted from Joyofbaking.com)
Ingredients:
4 large egg whites
1 cup of white sugar
1/4 tsp of salt
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 cup of cake flour (which can be substituted with 1/2 cup of all purpose flour + 1 tbsp of corn starch)
3 cups of sweetened coconut flakes ( I used Baker's Sweetened Coconut Flakes)
1/2 a bag of chocolate chips (semi-sweet or dark, depending on your preference)
Recipe:
0. Preheat oven to 325 degrees Fahrenheit.
1. Fill a small saucepan with water. Apply heat to pan until water is simmering.
2. In a glass bowl large enough to sit on top of the pan, whisk together te egg whites, sugar, and salt until the mixture is creamy and warm to the touch. Remove the bowl from heat. (We whisked for several minutes, which might have been overkill, but it happened at no consequence).
3. Add the vanilla, flour, and coconut to the bowl. Mix it well (, young Jedi. Apologies, I'm just trying to mix up my 'mix it up' bits).
(Thanks to M for providing the conversion rate for going between all purpose flour and cake flour.
Here's the math:
1 cup of cake flour = 7/8 cup of all purpose flour + 2 tbsp corn starch
Since the recipe called for 1/2 cup of cake flour, that means we would need 7/16 cup of all purpose flour and 1 tbsp of corn starch. To make life simple, we approximated the 7/16 cup as 1/2 cup of all purpose flour.)
4. Place the entire mixture in the refrigerator for 2 hours. (We only refrigerated for 1.5 hours, and it was fine. The mixture is mostly coconut anyway, so 1.5 hours was plenty for the small amount of liquid-y baking goo. Doesn't that sound pleasant?)
5. Line two baking pans with parchment paper (parchment paper will be important for the chocolate application step)
6. Apply ~1 tbsp (a little more is better and makes for bigger macaroons) of the mixture onto the baking pan. You can place them pretty close together (approx 1.5-2 inches) because they don't expand much.
7. Bake for 15 minutes until golden brown. (At fifteen minutes, the bottoms of our macaroons were already browning, but the tops were still white. To avoid the risk of burning the bottoms, we took them out at 15 minutes. After cooling, the macaroons became pleasantly firmer.)
8. Let the macaroons cool for 10-15 minutes.
9. Melt the chocolate chips with your microwave (1.5 minutes should be sufficient).
10. Dunk the macaroons (flat side facing the chocolate) into the melted chocolate.
11. Place the macaroons back on the parchment paper, chocolate side facing down.
12. If you have room in your refrigerator, place the sheets of macaroons in the fridge until chocolate has solidified. If you don't have room, an equally successful technique (but more time-consuming) is placing 2 bags of frozen vegetables under each baking pan. You may want to flip the bags over after a while (10-15 minutes, or as you see fit) in order to get the greatest amount of cooling power out of your veggies.
13. After chocolate has solidified, you should be able to easily remove the macaroons from the parchment paper without having too much chocolate stick to the paper. The macaroons have finished cooling when more chocolate sticks to the macaroon than to the paper when you try to remove them.
14. Store macaroons in a cool place to avoid melting the chocolate.
