Going Bananas

Kimberley :)

Hey everyone! If you'll recall, last month, my friend Kimberley and I embarked on a baking quest with high hopes, that ended with, let's just say, low outcomes. Our dream of fluffy, cute, Instagram-worthy cookies turned out to be an abomination to say the least. Did it impact any faith we had in ourselves to bake? Potentially for a while... but certainly not anymore! We decided to give it another go - the goal: to create an edible, aesthetically pleasing loaf of banana bread. We followed Estee's recipe here. I love to bake banana bread because it's super easy & all the ingredients you're already likely to have! Plus, it's a great way to put to use the overly ripe bananas no one wants to touch. 

So without further ado, these are the ingredients we used: 

• 3 or 4 ripe bananas
• 2 cups plain flour
• 1 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 cup milk
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 3/4 stick of butter
• 1 cup brown sugar 
• 1 egg 

Peel the bananas into a bowl, add milk. baking soda & vanilla essence and mash to your heart's content

Time to mix dry ingredients - flour, baking powder & salt

Blend softened stick of butter and raw sugar into a very healthy mixture

The batter after slowly adding in the dry ingredients, egg & mashed banana 

Ready for the oven! It took about 60 minutes to fully cook at 180 degrees celsius

such suspense at this point but it smelt soooo good

Success

Aw yis one professional looking plate of banana bread 

Kim and I were so happy the banana bread tasted and looked good - so we aren't complete culinary failures. After a successful baking night, we half-watched a terrible B-grade horror movie (this is why I don't do horror guys). Nevertheless, it's always nice to see and catch up with her! 

Also, I realised I only managed to upload twice through April... *disappointed in self*. In all honesty, I blame mid semesters but yes, I know, I gotta pick my game up. Butttt, I'm going to aim to post at least once a week this month *fingers crossed*. So hopefully you'll be hearing from me soon! Take care, love Thy x. 

The Way the Cookie Crumbles

Hey everyone! Hope you've had a good week. Unfortunately, I've been sick for most of last week and thus napping copiously instead of doing any studying. Woops. On the bright side, my friend Kimberley aka Kim came over Saturday night for a classic girl's night consisting of baking, movies and doing each other's makeup for no good reason. It was so good to catch up with her and being able to end my rather abysmal week on a high note. 

For the night's baking adventure, we decided to go simple and bake chocolate cookies using Tanya Burr's recipe. All you need is:

• 200g butter
• 175g self-raising flour
• 300g caster sugar 
• 75g cocoa powder (we used cacao)
• A large bar of white chocolate/milk chocolate (we also added Mars)

We didn't use these exact measurements and well, it turned out interesting, to say the least. I'll let you see for yourself.

Waterfall of sugar added to buttery goodness

One egg added to a creamy mixture 

Mix mix mix 

Mars Madness 

Oven ready!

Such high hopes for these babies

 After placing them in the oven for roughly 15 minutes we returned to take them out and well, they turned out like this....

My reaction was literally "WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED?!" Our cookies looked like they had been usurped by pure evil. Our cute baking night went downhill real quick when we baked devil's cookies. We have no idea how we managed to somehow mess up baking cookies. Like, literally, butter sugar and flour in circle format. We're not complete culinary failures though, they still ended up tasting good :) We were never going to get the beautiful "finished product" photo. But hey, that's just the way the cookie crumbles. 

Book Swap- I'm borrowing Kim's Night Circus and I am extremely excited to read it!

 The rest of the night was spent playing around with makeup, talking and watching Hector and the  Search For Happiness whilst eating mankind's ugliest cookies ever made. The movie was about a psychiatrist on his own quest for happiness, following his colourful adventures around the world. It was super cute and definitely worth the watch if you need a mood lifter. There will little lessons of happiness that popped up throughout the film. My favourite being "Happiness is not attaching too much importance to what other people think", which I think is something we can all use a constant reminder of. As always, thanks for reading!

Love, Thy x