The Cookie Monster: Banana Biscotti

As the weekend winds down and another busy week begins, I started in on my latest baking project: Thank You cookie bags for the presenters at my confirmation class. I was confirmed last weekend as a full-blown Catholic in preparation for my Wedding, and this week I'm having dinner with my class and the presenters who volunteered their time for the last 9 months. Cookie gifts were obviously in order.

I wanted to have some variety in my gift bags so tonight I thought I'd make a biscotti. Conveniently I had some very ripe bananas, so I googled some recipes. I started out following a random recipe from a blog, but ended up pretty much winging it due to several factors (my lack of brown sugar, love of butter etc...) Here's what I came up with.

2 eggs
1 cup sugar
2 mashed bananas
½ cup butter
1 tablespoon vanilla
2.5 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
2 tablespoons cinnamon, whoops
1 cup choc chips

First I mixed together my sugar and butter, eggs, vanilla and bananas. I couldn't resist putting in a second banana, when my recipe only called for one, so at that point I just went totally rogue and started making things up.

Then I added in my flour, baking soda and cinnamon. I thought I had a slotted cap on my jar of cinnamon, however this was not the case. As a result, I dumped a TON of cinnamon directly into my batter. I tried to skim some out, but I decided it was best to just roll with it. Apparently there's fiber in cinnamon, call it a health food.

After it was all mixed together it was time to form the dough into logs. This was more challenging than usual as the dough was SUPER sticky. SO sticky in fact that I thought my experiment might be going awry. NO way to tell for sure though until you bake the damn thing. so....Into the oven!

Bake at 350 for about 30 minutes. In my oven, more like 27 minutes. I think my oven is gradually getting hotter, I need to start systematically knocking minutes off my bake time.