Banana Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting!

A lot of you might be thinking that I was kidnapped and forced away from a computer but the truth is that I was having a hard time deciding which recipes to post... and to be completely honest time has definitely gotten away again.  Anyways the blog must go on... to rephrase the famous saying.  On to the recipe... A lot of people have heard of the wonderful combination of carrot cake with cream cheese frosting!  So when we see banana cake with cream cheese frosting, hopefully we all should be thinking that it's either an interesting and worth trying, or that it sounds like a wonderful idea... Just so you guys know, I have felt both of these things... Before I go any further, Paula Deen came up with this original recipe, but I added something to it.  When first trying the original recipe, found the cake to have a really great flavor but the cake was dense and I was determined to find the solution.  Thankfully the solution was easy to find.  I am going to answer a question that I think a lot of people have asked and no one has answered.  First I am going to get you guys the original recipe.

Banana Cake
3 Cups All Purpose Flour
2 Cups Granulated Sugar
1 tsp. Baking Soda
1 tsp. Ground Cinnamon
1/2 tsp. Salt
3 Eggs, beaten
3/4 Cup Vegetable Oil
1 tsp. Pure Vanilla Extract
1 Cup Chopped Walnuts
4 Ripe Bananas Mashed
*1 Cup Buttermilk

*-my addition

Like I said before, when I tried this cake recipe, the cake was dense; but upon looking over the recipe, I noticed one big thing...  The leavening agent was not used to its full potential.  Both Baking Soda/Powder do two things: help the baked product to rise, and lighten the texture of the baked product.  You are now going to learn the difference between baking soda and baking powder.  Baking Soda is another name of bicarbonate of soda, and you chemistry nerds know exactly what that is used for... one of the things is for the lava in the paper mache volcanoes... Sorry a little blast from the past, but they also are used to remove stains from anything... If you don't believe me about that, just ask your Grandma!  In order for baking soda to be used as a leavening agent it requires two things: acid and liquid in order to be activated.  Baking Power is bicarbonate of soda with an added powdered acid (most likely cream of tarter) which you probably know you add to meringues to help strengthen the integrity of the meringue.

When I looked at the recipe after I made it for the first time, I realized the ingredients were missing a very important thing... an acid, because not only did the cake need to be lightened but also needed a little bit more moisture.  So I added 1 Cup of buttermilk which, despite the name, is low in fat.  This lone addition made a huge difference.  Instead of being more dense than banana bread, it was now light and moist like a cake should be.  Oh, you should know, that if you do not use buttermilk on a regular basis that there is a substitute... (1 tbls. Lemon Juice to 1 Cup of milk)  Now for the Cream Cheese Frosting...  It is always better to make your own because its easy and much more flavorful and fresh than anything from the can.  Here's the recipe:

Cream Cheese Frosting
1 8 oz. Package Cream Cheese, room temperature
1 Stick Butter, room temperature
1 pound Powdered Sugar
1 tsp. Pure Vanilla Extract
Pinch of Salt

For the Cake: Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Mix/Sift together the Flour, Sugar, Baking Soda, Salt, and Cinnamon together.  Cream together the Eggs, Buttermilk, Vegetable Oil, and Vanilla Extract.  Mix together the wet and dry ingredients together until combined, and then add bananas and walnuts, of course if you don't like the nuts, or you are allergic to them, you can leave them out.  In fact if you are allergic to the walnuts then it is highly recommended that you leave them out.   But another substitute for the walnuts is chocolate chips!  And how could you go wrong with chocolate!!!  Unless you are allergic.  Anyways, for the frosting: cream together the cream cheese and the butter, which is much easier to do when these two ingredients are at room temperature.  Slowly add the powdered sugar in increments so your electric mixer doesn't throw the sugar all over you and the kitchen... Trust  me, from personal experiences you don't want to clean up that kind of mess.  Note the frosting will be creamier if you sift the powdered sugar, but it is not a necessary step, then you add the pinch of salt and the vanilla extract and cream once more... the salt helps to take away some of the sweetness of the frosting and helps to bring out the other flavors in the frosting.  Here is the final look on the cupcakes I recently baked!

I hope you enjoy these recipes and I am so glad that you took the time to read this and I hope to post again soon with another treasured recipe.  Until next time.

Barley Risotto

I understand that I have taken a break with telling you some of my culinary school stories... I only have a few.  This one is one of my favorites, you probably see the title and are thinking of something that you have never thought of before.  This class was my first of lab classes where we got to cook every night, and I loved it!  It worked me harder than I had ever worked before.  This class was on Mondays and Wednesdays from 5:30-9:50 p.m. It was rough but I had so much fun, and one of the favorite things that I made was barley risotto, I saw this on our lab and I was really excited because I had not thought of making risotto with anything else but arborio rice (short-grain rice).  I was put in charge of making this dish all by myself.  My professor was French so he was hard to understand at times, but he was really fun to work with because he would crack jokes right and left when he was in a good mood. So anyways back to the dish... He told us that in order to get the perfect texture of the barley we had to par-cook it in boiling water... But that is all that he told us... :( Ok the thing to do here is to not panic... just kidding... I ended up cooking it in the boiling water for about a half an hour and it turned out the perfect texture to start the risotto!  So we took about 4 cups of chicken stock along with 1 cup of the par-cooked barley, a couple tablespoons of butter and about 1/4 of finely chopped onion.  After sweating the onion in one tablespoon of butter we put the barley in and "toasted" it before we started adding stock.  Anyone that has watched the food network knows that you add a little bit of the stock at a time and stir constantly over a low-medium heat until the barley has a chance to absorb almost all of the stock and then you repeat that process until all of the stock is used or the barley is cooked to the perfect texture.  Then once the barley is cooked add the last tablespoon of butter and add as little or as much parmesan cheese as you like and add salt and pepper accordingly.  This whole process of adding the stock and stirring will take about 20-30 minutes so this dish takes about one hour of cooking time but is a lot healthier than regular risotto but tastes almost the same. :)  After everything was cooked my professor tasted all of our dishes he commented that mine had good flavor and texture...  For the first time of me cooking risotto of any kind I was really impressed with how well it turned out.  So even though it is too late to make a long story short I gave myself a huge pat on my back for that.  I loved that class and I will never forget it.  Even though I am not a part of the culinary program anymore, I loved being a part of it because it gave me some cooking techniques and recipes that will help me out later in life.

Whats New?

Hello Readers!

I just wanted to give you a quick update before this year comes to a conclusion.  My major is no longer in Culinary Arts...  I have stopped taking culinary classes at American River College, however I still love to cook and I will continue to post some of my favorite recipes, but I have recently come to realize that my career passion lies elsewhere.  I am now studying to become a lawyer.  A lot of you are probably wondering why I came to this conclusion... I think that this was always in the back of my mind, however discovering cooking and my talent for it blocked my passion for law for a very long time.  I came to realize this undiscovered passion in early-mid January of 2012 when I was summoned for Jury Duty! :(   I first dreaded this experience because I did not want to spend all day at the courthouse waiting all day just to be excused, but I wasn't excused... After a very long day and a lot of different breaks, I was actually selected to be on a Jury!!! Yikes! My first time ever being summoned for jury duty and I get picked!  I didn't know what was going to happen... But I got to see a glimpse of what an attorney does for a living and it is really interesting!  Then I put this experience in the back of my mind because I had classes and a job that I had to worry about! Now that both things are out of the way for now I get to focus on truly finding out who I am and what I want to do with my life!  I am very excited for this career path change and I can't wait to see where this path in life will take me!  I apologize for not posting sooner!  And last but certainly not least I hope to see more readers! I hope you come to me with cooking questions as I would still love to help you out!  My email is still the same: mystuffandcooking@gmail.com  I wish you all a Happy New Year!!!! Look out 2013! Here I come!!!

Thumbprint Cookies!

Sorry it has taken me a while to post on my blog... I have been busy and with the start of school, and I have also been trying to find a good recipe to post. So here is one!  Thumbprint Cookies! These are cookies that I have loved since I was a little girl, and where you can truly become creative with what you have lying around the house!   Adults this is a great thing to do with your kids as well!  I did not come up with this recipe so I do have to give a shout out to the beloved Paula Deen for this recipe in her cookbook: Paula Deen's Kitchen Classics! Which is a combination of two of her cookbooks: The Lady & Sons Savannah Country Cookbook and The Lady & Sons!  I made these for my friends and they were a huge hit so it finally hit me that I could have a great blog post!  True to Paula's nature they don't just have 1 stick of butter but try... 3!!!! That's right 3 sticks of butter altogether in these cookies! I think that is what makes them so delicious!!! LOL! I love you Paula Deen!

Thumbprint Cookies!

3 Sticks Butter, softened
1 C Granulated Sugar
2 Egg Yolks
2 3/4 to 3 3/4 C AP Flour (depending on the humidity)
1/4 tsp. Salt
1 tsp. Pure Vanilla Extract
Any Preserves that pleases you!

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Cream together the butter and sugar.
3. Add Egg Yolks.
4. Sift Flour and salt; blend into butter mixture.
5. Spoon out into 1 inch balls and place on ungreased cookie sheet.
6. Make an indentation in center of cookie with thumb.
7. Fill with your favorite preserves... only 1 tsp. per cookie will suffice.
8. Bake for 15 minutes or until lightly browned. Cool slightly and Enjoy!!! :-)


I love making these cookies and to be honest I have even used nutella in these cookies which is good but have about three large glasses of milk on the side for just one cookie! LOL! I hope you love these cookies as much as my family, friends, and I do! Thanks for reading and sorry for the delay!!!

Pineapple Salsa

I know what you must be thinking, Pineapple..... Salsa..????! I know I thought the same thing when I was in a culinary class, called Food Theory and Preparation, in college.  It was one of the recipes that my group was to prepare in class, and the first thought that came into my head was "I hate pineapple why would I ever make this?!" I know I am a weirdo for not liking pineapple, but that is something that I have come to terms with a long time ago.  After making it I decided to try it and it was absolutely fantastic!  The first time I introduced it to my family was for my sister Lauren's Bridal Shower! And everyone loved it!  In fact my aunt loves it so much I think she secretly hopes I make it whenever there is a party that we both attend! LOL! In fact I went to my Uncle's birthday barbecue last Saturday and this salsa was specially requested! The reason  I love this salsa so much because of its many complex flavors, it's sweet, tart, spicy, savory; it has the whole package and I hope you make it for your next party.  Here is the recipe...

1 Pineapple, peeled, cored, and chopped

3 Medium Sized Tomatoes, peeled and seeded

1-2 Jalapenos, seeded (to taste)

1 Lemon, Zest and Juice

1 Bunch of Cilantro

1 Bunch of Scallions

Salt, to taste

It is also probably the easiest recipe that I will post on this blog LOL! Because it is basically chop everything up and put it together! Anyways for the tomatoes I have a great trick to peel them easily.  Get a pot of boiling water and core the tomatoes and turn them over and score them on the bottom, put the tomatoes in the boiling water until you see the peel starts to come off, about 1-2 minutes and take them out and put them in an ice bath to stop the cooking for about a minute, and then the peels come off way easier, then to get the seeds out cut them in half and scoop them out. Then they are ready to use for the salsa!  Mince the jalapenos and chop the pineapple up small!  I hope you enjoy!!!

The Best Teen Chef Competition!!!

My story continues a few years later... The reason it skips a few years is because I did not have access to culinary classes in my High School, so I spent that time cooking a little and watching Food Network for the rest of the time. When I was a senior in High School and I was looking into colleges, I knew at least one thing... they had to have an amazing culinary program!!! The main school I was interested in was The Art Institute of Sacramento, their campus was incredibly clean and beautiful and the culinary program was ingenious with their own cafe!  So naturally that was the school for me, the sad news on this was that the tuition was way too expensive  so in my last efforts to get into the school of my dreams was to enter in the Best Teen Chef competition which if I won at nationals I would  receive a full-ride scholarship to The Art Institute!!! So to enter I had to invent a recipe and write an essay of why I thought The Art Institute was the school for me to attend.  So the recipe that I came up with was a dessert that combines my favorite dessert ever with one of my favorite flavor combinations.  The recipe was for a Chocolate-Orange Cheesecake, which I submitted and I got into the semi-finals of the competition!  Now the recipe is kind of long so instead of posting it on this post I am going to give you the link so that you can take a look at it.  I put it on a website where you could freely publish recipes, and I thought that it was extremely cool that I came up with this recipe all by myself being only seventeen years old at the time!  Here is the link...  http://www.cooks.com/rec/view/0,236,155179-237204,00.html. For the semi-finals of this competition I had to cook four separate dishes within a 90 minute period, very Iron Chef style LOL! We could be creative and that was my favorite part of this competition! All I can say is that I made some of the best food that I could have created.  Same thing as to where I placed in the competition, all they told of the 18 competitors is   the top 3 of which I was not mentioned.  So to this day I do not know where I placed :-( but it was not all bad, of course I was disappointed; however, I knew that I would grow from this experience, and I knew that it would change my life for better or for worse.  So the college I ended up going to is one with almost the same type of culinary program but in a community college setting! I ended up going to American River College, and I am loving every minute of it! The next stories will be of my adventures in my culinary classes!

I just realized that I did not give my email address for you to email me your questions and comments on this blog so here it is... mystuffandcooking@gmail.com

Spanish Rice!!!

There is nothing more comforting to me and my family than a big pot full of rice... but if you think about it just plain rice is great with butter and salt or soy sauce, but to me that gets kind of boring after a while.  To me Spanish Rice is the ultimate way to eat rice and the flavors that are infused into it make it one of the most amazing side dishes for me and my family.  In fact my mom loves to make this with chicken enchiladas for any special dinner, but this dish goes great with tacos, or any Mexican inspired meal you plan to have.  This dish means that we either have company coming over or we just want to eat incredibly flavored food together as we talk about our day.  As much as I want to take all of the credit... I have to give most of it to the Pillsbury Kitchen's Cookbook, and I would just like to take a quick moment to thank them for an amazing recipe, and a great canvas and challenge to tweak it and make it even better.  I think I have just the ingredient that does it.  But instead of me just telling you what that ingredient is we are going to play a little game called Guess the Ingredient!
Clue #1: Red or Green
Clue #2: Spicy
Clue #3: Small
That's right it's a jalapeno pepper!

Here's the recipe:

6 slices of bacon

1 Cup White or Brown Rice

1 Medium Onion, chopped

1/4 Cup Green Bell Pepper, chopped

1 Jalapeno Pepper, halved and seeded
2 Cups of Water

14.5 oz. Can Diced Tomatoes

1/4 Cup Ketchup plus another squirt

1 Tsp. Salt

1/8 Tsp. Ground Black Pepper

1. Fry the bacon in the pan and remove.

2. Cook the rice, onion, and bell pepper in about 2 tbls. of bacon fat until onion is nice and tender.

3. Mix the wet ingredients and seasonings and add to the rice mixture and throw in the pepper and crumble 1/2 of the bacon and mix in.

4. Simmer covered for 35-40 minutes stirring occasionally.  Top with the crumbled remaining bacon. Remove the jalapeno pepper and serve.

I don't chop up the jalapeno pepper and saute it, but I halve the pepper and take out the ribs and the seeds just so I can infuse the flavors of the liquid in this dish with the warm flavor of the pepper.  I decided to add the jalapeno which is not normally in the dish because when I think of Spanish/Mexican cuisine, I think of spice and warmth and comfort. I hope that you enjoy this recipe that my family has for years!