Jamana bread

Homemade jam + rotting bananas = jammy banana bread. Or as I've decided to call it, jamana bread.

It's nothing ground breaking, just a basic banana bread recipe with a few dollops of strawberry jam swirled through the batter before baking, but tasty nonetheless. 

I used Mary Berry's banana bread recipe from her Baking Bible (previously blogged here) as it's a firm favourite for versatility. I've made countless variations over the years but I think this is the first time I've added jam. I just wish I had left it to bake another couple of minutes in the oven as it's marginally under baked. It was difficult to judge whether the stickiness on the skewer was unbaked cake batter or a pocket of jam!

Linzer cookies

My first festive post of 2020! Hopefully I'll manage more but I'll see how things go. This year I was determined to try a couple of new recipes for baked Christmas gifts instead of defaulting to my usual assortment of shortbread, fudge/tablet and gingerbread biscuits.

First up are these linzer cookies, which are basically festive jammy dodger biscuits. I've had this recipe bookmarked from Katiecakes blog for a while so I'm pleased to have finally tried it. Her bakes and photography are always lovely.

These biscuits were fun to make. The dough didn't need chilling which meant they weren't too faffy to prepare either. My only alteration, if you can call it that, was rolling my dough out to 1/4" thick. The recipe says 3/8" but I felt 1/4" was thick enough considering two biscuits get stuck together. I used a 2.5" diameter round cutter and got 22 completed sandwich biscuits in total from the dough. I also used up almost an entire jar of strawberry jam to fill them.

Not much else to report other than they looked very pretty and made lovely gifts to drop off at relatives' doors this week. Vanilla biscuits with jam are always a crowd pleaser. I also have Katiecakes' chocolate and dulce de leche linzer cookies bookmarked so hopefully I'll try them sometime too.

Wishing you all (if anyone still reads) a Merry Christmas and if you don't celebrate Christmas, I hope you have a lovely Friday.