I've gone Bananas: Banana Bread Brownies

While perusing Pintrest, I saw an amazing picture of banana bread brownies.  I clicked on the picture and it led me to an amazing blog "life's simple measures".  One of the things I love about Pintrest is it leads me to discover all these great food blogs! As I mentioned before, I'm trying branch out from my main beau chocolate, so I thought this recipe would be a great experiment.  I've seen many different variations of this recipe, but this one featured a brown butter frosting....aka heaven (take my word for it).  Preparing the batter for the brownies was pretty straight forward, but I'll have to try this with whole wheat flour instead.  Using the walnuts is optional, so I left them out and instead used crushed pecans on top of the frosting.  The recipe calls for a bake time of about 25 minutes, but because I used a smaller pan and my brownies were thicker (like cake thickness), I had to leave them in the oven for about 40 minutes.  This is the tricky part: you have to prepare the brown butter frosting so it is ready when the brownies are.  Because I had to wait so long for mine to bake, the frosting began to stiffen up so I had to keep heating it up on low.

Now for the frosting, you have to BROWN the butter by melting only the butter on the stove until it turns a light brown color.  This is a hard thing to do because the butter will burn really fast so you have to watch it! Then I added the powdered sugar, milk and vanilla the recipe called for.  Once it was all nice and melted, I poured it right on top of the brownies, while they were still warm.  I added the pecans and let them cool off for an hour.  I ended up taking these to a party at Matt's friend's house later that night, and let me tell you..they were a hit! I think they lasted about a half hour. I definitely will be making more of these!   I copied the recipe below so you can try them too!

http://lifessimplemeasures.blogspot.com/2012/01/banana-bread-bars-with-brown-butter.html

Ingredients:

Banana Bread Bars:

1-1/2 c. sugar

1 c. sour cream

1/2 c. butter, softened

2 eggs

1-3/4 (3 or 4) ripe bananas, mashed

2 tsp. vanilla extract

2 c. all purpose flour

1 tsp. baking soda

3/4 tsp. salt

1/2 c. chopped walnuts (optional)

Brown Butter Frosting:

1/2 c. butter

4 c. powdered sugar

1-1/2 tsp. vanilla extract

3 tbsp. milk

Directions:

1.  Heat oven to 375F.  Grease and flour 15x10-inch jelly roll pan.  For the bars, in a large bowl, beat together sugar, sour cream, butter, and eggs until creamy.  Blend in bananas and vanilla extract.  Add flour, baking soda, salt, and blend for 1 minute.  Stir in walnuts.

2.  Spread batter evenly into pan.  Bake 20 to 25 minutes or until golden brown.

3.  Meanwhile, for frosting, heat butter in a large saucepan over medium heat until boiling.  Let the butter turn a delicate brown and remove from heat immediately.

4.  Add powdered sugar, vanilla extract and milk.  Whisk together until smooth (it should be thicker than a glaze but thinner than frosting).  Using a spatula, spread the brown butter frosting over the warm bars (the frosting will be easier to spread while the bars are still warm). 

Yield: 2 dozen large bars