low fat oatmeal banana muffins

Yesterday, I started my first week on winter break from school. Although I'm continuing to work (Wednesdays and Fridays), I have Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays to do whatever I please! And I actually accomplished a lot yesterday.

I gave my apartment a much-needed cleaning, a kind of deep cleaning that hasn't happened since this summer. I went to the fabric store to get yarn - and began a new knitting project. My boyfriend, James, and I went out to dinner at the new French bakery in our neighborhood called La Boulangerie. Then it was nighttime and I decided to bake some muffins to eat for breakfast the next morning.

Low fat recipes are never really my first choice. The lack of butter always makes me skeptical as butter is singlehandedly the best food to bake with on the planet. But I found a Joy the Baker recipe and I usually like her recipes, so I gave her Low Fat Oatmeal Banana Bread recipe a try. Here's her recipe:

"makes 1 loaf  of  10 slices

- 1 1/4 cup all-purpose flour
- 1/2 cup packed brown sugar
- 1/2 tsp  salt
- 1/2 tsp baking soda
- 1/4 tsp baking powder
- 1/2 tsp cinnamon
- 3 tsp canola or walnut  oil
- 1 large egg, beaten
- 2 medium egg whites, beaten
- 3 large bananas, ripe
- 1 cup uncooked old fashioned oats

Preheat oven to 350°F.  Grease and flour a loaf pan and set aside. In a large bowl, stir together dry ingredients including the oats and cinnamon.

In a smaller bowl, mash bananas with a potato masher or fork. Add oil and whole egg and mix thoroughly.

Add the wet ingredients to the dry and mix well.  Batter will be fairly thick.

In a medium sized bowl, with an electric hand mixer, beat the egg whites until medium stiff peaks form.  Fold the egg whites into the batter in three additions.

Pour batter into pan and bake until top of loaf is firm to touch, 45 to 50 minutes. Remove from oven and allow to cool in pan for 5 minutes. Flip out and cool on a wire rack for another 10 minutes. Slice loaf into 10 equally sized slices."

Obviously, I made muffins, so I just distributed the batter equally into a 12 medium sized muffin pan. I wanted a dessert, so I also added chocolate pieces to a few of them to eat right away. But I saved the rest for breakfast.

To be totally honest, the muffins tasted a little too healthy- very bran-ny. They didn't have the moist semi-greasiness that using real butter will give you but at least they were nutritious. Also, the uncooked oats didn't seem to cook completely and added a tiny crunch to the muffin. This was not necessarily bad but it was unusual.

All in all, it was a fun day and I'm glad I tried the recipe!

teacup & cupcake sugar cookies

Like most students, I get a lot accomplished during finals week. Although the tasks accomplished tend to be anything I picked up while procrastinating. Instead of buckling down and studying or writing a paper before the deadline, I'm shopping for holiday gifts, cleaning up my apartment, and of course- baking!

It just so happens that my work had its holiday party this week, during finals, so I had to bring in a dessert for the potluck party. Because my office is mixed with Jewish and Christian celebrators, I didn't want to make Christmas cookies that were shaped like Santa or trees. So I went to Michaels and picked up some cookie cutters that were cute -teacups, teapots, and cupcake shapes- and decorated them with green and red icing. Here's the allrecipes.com recipe that I found for the sugar cookies:

INGREDIENTS: 

1 1/2 cups butter, softened 

2 cups white sugar 

4 eggs 

1 teaspoon vanilla extract 

5 cups all-purpose flour 

2 teaspoons baking powder 

1 teaspoon salt 

DIRECTIONS: 

1. In a large bowl, cream together butter and sugar until smooth. Beat in  eggs and vanilla. Stir in the flour, baking powder, and salt. Cover, and  chill dough for at least one hour (or overnight). 

2. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F (200 degrees C). Roll out dough on floured surface 1/4 to 1/2 inch thick. Cut into shapes with any cookie cutter. Place cookies 1 inch apart on ungreased cookie sheets. 

3. Bake 6 to 8 minutes in preheated oven. Cool completely.

This recipe was so easy! I made the dough around 11:00 am, went to a final, and came back home around 5:30 pm and the dough was chilled perfectly. It wouldn't have been very hard to make homemade icing, but I didn't want to buy all the food coloring that I probably wouldn't use again until next year. Therefore, I just bought tubes of icing that you can squeeze right out onto the cookie.

After applying the icing, I put all the cookies on a cookie sheet, uncovered, into the oven overnight. Don't turn on the oven! Just keep them there. By the morning, the icing had hardened just enough where it wouldn't get messed up during the transportation of the cookies. And let me just say, they were absolutely delicious! Perfect sugar cookies! Many thanks to my awesome KitchenAide Mr. Mixer!