Naan Therapy

Banana-chocolate bar

I am sick of store bought bars – I don’t know what it is about them that makes them repulsive after one bite. So, I have been asking my husband to experiment with home made bars. The first one  he made was David’s fruitcake bar with a minor modification – an added teaspoon of fennel seeds. It turned out delicious of course, perhaps a little crumblier than a breakfast bar and a little sweeter, but delicious all the same.

The next one he attempted was Clotilde’s banana chocolate breakfast bars. This turned out great as well. For some reason, we always seem to have overripe bananas at hand, so we have made the banana bar a few times already. The recipe is highly tweakable and easy to make. In fact we put together the last batch at the end of a 14 hr long work day! The basic idea behind these banana bars is to make a matrix of solids – oatmeal, coconut, chocolate chips and nut flakes, then make a gooey mix by adding in the wet components –  mashed ripe banana. In the last batch, we added a dollop of chestnut puree. Yum! To avoid the bars from drying out, I wrap individual size portions in stretch plastic and store in airtight container in the fridge. It makes them easy to carry to work for breakfast or snack.

A slice of plummy chocolatey sticky low fat cake

It is the brandy syrup saturating the cake that does the trick! The cake tastes way better than it looks – very plummy and full of molten chocolate. And the addition of liqueur, in our case Calvados, makes its aroma richer and the taste more voluptuous than you would think from the small amount of fat in it.

Thank you Clotilde, it is one of the best chocolate cakes we have eaten yet. Ad Hoc can try this one out instead of the ho-hum brownies that they chose to serve us after their not-so-good ribs.

Read the rest of this entry »