3 Fun Treats to Bake in Quarantine

Ever since the quarantine started, a lot of people have been stuck at home, bored with few things to do. While I have been quarantined, I have been making lots of different baked goods and experimenting with different recipes in the kitchen. The brownie, banana bread, and sugar cookie recipes all seemed to have the best results.

Banana Bread Recipe: I took this recipe from Food Network and replaced the walnuts with chocolate chips (for obvious reasons). I’ve found that in most recipes nuts can easily be exchanged for another ingredient or taken out completely. Unfortunately, I didn’t take out the eggs (which need to be at room temperature) early enough, so I put them in a small bowl of lukewarm water and waited for a few minutes. This brought their temperature up. Overall, the baking process went smoothly and I was able to finish everything on time. If you have extra bananas that are browning and aren’t being eaten, this is a great recipe to try.

Sugar Cookie Recipe: My brother and I found this recipe from William Sonoma. The sugar cookies took a little bit more time and effort to bake. We had to let the dough sit in the fridge for a while before baking. Because we didn’t have any colored sugar and didn’t want to frost them, we decided to use Marvel Hero Cookie Cutters to make our cookies slightly more aesthetically pleasing. After one test bake with the shape, we realized that we weren’t baking them for long enough, causing them to be too pale and slightly undercooked. We baked all the other batches for about a minute longer. One complaint I have was that the cookie itself wasn’t very flavorful enough and needed something to go with it.

Brownie Recipe: The brownie recipe, which I got from Handle the Heat was fairly straightforward. However, I managed to confuse a teaspoon for a tablespoon when adding the cornstarch. Thankfully, I was able to catch my mistake immediately and added how much more I thought needed to be put in. Since I didn’t want to waste an egg by just adding an extra yolk, I put in the whites too. This didn’t affect anything and it still turned out ok when the final product was done.

All the recipes are linked in the article if you want to try them out. Have fun!