Ginger-banana bread

Warm and cozy as an open fire, soft and rich as a scrap of golden-brown velvet, exotic and strange as a Byzantine ceiling, a beautiful smell blooms from the oven. The experiment seems to be going well. I open the oven and test the loaves for doneness, not quite yet. I slide them back in and wait five minutes. This time, the toothpick comes out clean. I take them out of the oven. After they cool on a rack for a while, I slice some pieces, warm, dense, moist, rich with spices, slightly sweet from banana, and with a bit of crunch from the walnuts. Perfect. My ginger-banana bread turned out just the way I had hoped it would.

Struggling for the last month with high fevers, bronchitis, and an infected molar, I haven't spent much time in the kitchen. Fever and antibiotics killed my appetite and wasted my energy, so it's been a struggle to eat anything at all, and I mostly let my family eat a lot of takeout. Things are rarely ideal, and sometimes they are less ideal than others.

In the meantime, I've been reading Michael Ruhlman's book Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking and getting more and more excited to get in and work with some of the ratios. For a creative cook (especially a mostly self-taught home cook like myself), the book is a gift. Ruhlman breaks down fundamental kitchen techniques into simple ratios. Once you understand the ratios and how the basic ingredients work together, you can layer on and riff from there. The book teaches you reading and writing; with those basics, you can create poetry. It's exciting stuff.

The opportunity to test one of the ratios came as some of my son's bananas grew dark and unappealing. I didn't want to let them go to waste, but they were no longer fit to eat out of hand. Thus banana bread. So I checked out Ruhlman's ratio for quickbreads: 2/2/1/1. Two parts flour, two parts liquid, one part egg, and one part fat. OK. (Note that these ratios are based on weight, not volume.) And I checked out his basic recipe for quickbread/muffin batter, which is based on the ratios. But I got it into my head that I wanted to include some of the flavors from my mother's gingerbread cookies. And I was off and mixing. I was going to make gingerbread banana bread. (Or, as some friends have suggested, baginger bread, ginanabread, or gingy-nanny bread. If you have ideas for a good name, please fire away in the comments. I think I kind of like baginger bread.)

Anyway, this is one of the easiest possible things you could ever make. You'll need two bowls (one for dry ingredients and one for wet), a scale, and a loaf pan. Note: the recipe that follows makes one loaf; I made two because I had quite a lot of dark bananas. Also, you could probably do a straight swap of banana for pumpkin puree, and it would be delicious too.

Ingredients
Measure by weight on your scale, except where noted in teaspoons.

• 8 oz all-purpose flour
• 4 oz brown sugar (white sugar will do in a pinch)
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp ground cloves
• 1 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1 tsp ground dried ginger
• 1 tsp finely chopped orange zest
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1 cup mashed banana (about 2-3 bananas)
• 6 oz milk
• 2 large eggs
• 4 oz unsalted butter, melted 
• 1/4 chopped walnuts (optional)

What to Do

1. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit and butter, oil, or spray a loaf pan. 
2. Place your dry ingredients bowl on the scale and measure flour, sugar, salt, spices, and baking powder. Mix the ingredients with a whisk until everything is uniformly distributed.  
3. Place your wet ingredients bowl on the scale, measure milk, and then add eggs, melted butter, and banana. Mix everything together until the egg is evenly distributed throughout the liquid.
4. Mix your wet and your dry ingredients until they just come together. Scrape the batter out into the greased loaf pan and slide it into the oven. 
5. Check for doneness after 40 minutes by sticking a toothpick into the center of the loaf. If it comes out clean and dry, the loaf is done. If it's still wet, check in five-minute intervals.
6. When you take it out of the oven, let it cool in the pan for a while. Then slide the loaf out of the pan and let it cool on a baking rack. It's good warm, but I think it's best completely cooled. 
7. Watch out for small, thieving hands. Trust me, this bread is not going to last. 

My mother's gingerbread cookies

Like many moms and daughters, my mother and I sometimes have a strained relationship. Although it's far better now than when I was a teen and screaming matches were the norm, the distance between us (about 4,144 miles; she lives just outside Stockholm, Sweden) helps to keep the peace.

And yet, I miss her at times. And I miss the Christmas traditions I grew up with, which I try to re-create but don't always attain. (Of course some of those traditions I don't mind failing to re-create: I can't stand pickled herring, and I dislike lutefisk--I must be a bad Scandinavian.)

One of the traditions I do like is making gingerbread cookies. For years, I tried different recipes, but none of them were "right," and then a couple of years ago, my mother sent me a handwritten note with a recipe and some old cookie cutters.

This most valuable of all gifts held the recipe to my mother's gingerbread cookies, which was also my Finnish grandmother's favorite recipe and came from a 1940's cookbook called Hemhushållningens Grunder (which means the foundations of household care) by Rima Melander. And now I am going to share it with you.

Before you get started, you should be prepared for a few things. First, you will start the dough at least one day before you get to baking so that the flavors have time to mellow and blend and so that the dough has plenty of time to relax. Second, this recipe requires a bit of muscle in the stirring and mixing phase. Third, this recipe makes an enormous batch of cookies as a photo from a few years ago shows. It will take several hours to bake them all. If you don't want to make them all at once, you can cut the dough in half and refrigerate the unused portion for up to a week.

OK, now that caveats are out of the way, let's get to work. You will need:

• 1 Tbsp orange zest (no white part), very finely chopped
• 2 tsp ground cinnamon
• 2 tsp ground dried ginger
• 2 tsp cloves
• 200 grams syrup (I use Lyle's Golden Syrup, which is made from cane sugar, but you can use corn syrup; for extra flavor, feel free to replace some of the syrup with molasses)
• 400 grams white sugar
• 2 teaspoons baking soda
• 300 grams butter
• 3 large eggs
• 800 grams all purpose flour

And here's how to put it all together. Mix sugar, syrup, and spices in a pot with a thick bottom:

Over medium heat, bring the sugar and spice (and everything nice) mixture to a gentle simmer:

Here's where it gets exciting. Take the pot off the heat, add the baking soda to the mix, and stir intensely until the mix cools off a bit. It will froth up quite a lot.

When the mix has cooled a bit, stir in the butter (this may take a little while) and then stir in the eggs. Finally, add the flour to the mix in the pot, a few tablespoons at a time. When the mix in the pot gets too stiff to continue stirring, make a mount of the remaining flour on a bread board; make a hole in the middle of the mound of flour; pour in the sugar, spice, and butter mixture; and start mixing it all together. It will make a big mess, but eventually you will be able to combine the flour with the sugar and spices. When you have a nice smooth dough, sprinkle flour in a bowl, place the dough in the bowl, and then sprinkle some flour over the top of the dough. Put it in the refrigerator to rest at least 24 hours.

On the day when you plan to bake the cookies, get the dough out of the refrigerator and let it warm up for at least an hour (or rolling out the dough will just be too difficult). Preheat the oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit.

On a floured board, cut the dough into manageable pieces. Watch out for small thieving hands!

Roll out the dough to about a quarter inch thickness and cut shapes with cookie cutters. (Or you can go freehand if you like.) The moose, the squirrel, and the hedgehog are new additions to my cookie cutter collection. I found them at IKEA.

 

Bake them for 5-6 minutes and let them cool on a baking rack (they will be pliable when they first come out of the oven, but will crisp up as they cool). Enjoy!