Who’s ready for 2018?!

Alright. We’re two days into the new year, how does that make you feel? Personally, I spent all of the first day in bed, cuddling with my lovely and eating a bunch of junk food. We both told ourselves that we would get our shit together at the beginning of the year but we needed one day of doing absolutely nothing together so we chose January 1st. We both have really busy lives and that usually means we eat dinner really late, equating to pretty unhealthy options, drinking more and sleeping in way longer than we should.

So we did the “smart” thing and started the year off by not leaving the bed, shoving cheez-its and Chinese food in our faces and attempting to watch an entire season of Breaking Bad. I’m not upset at all and today I feel refreshed and ready for the year.

I’ve had a lot of new ideas for Good Sugar Baking. The problem is trying to weed out the ones that won’t work and keeping the ones that will work in my mind. I have A LOT to learn and now that Good Sugar Baking is my sole form of income it’s time to do the learnin’ and growin’!

Side note, look at these real cool buttons! Feel free to ask me for one.

What’s up with January, then? Some sweet, new photographs of delicious cookies and whatnots. With professional photography I will be adding a REAL online store so all of you can purchase cookies at your leisure, making it so easy for you! I will also be upgrading my packaging to something extremely cool for all of my accounts. Which takes me to accounts. The beginning of the year is going to be a lot of cookie samples going around town to get the name out there more.

Of course the thing that keeps me really excited about this opportunity is still giving back to nonprofits. Starting January I switch to a new nonprofit, one that a good friend of mine chose and it’s one that I’m very excited to be partnering with. The National Park Foundation has been going through some changes and could use some help! So every pairing, every cookie, everything that Good Sugar Baking sells will give a percentage back to The National Park Foundation. 

Check out the schedule for upcoming pairings:

January 11th: Joyride beer and cookie pairing

January 17th: Zuni Street beer and cookie pairing

January 18th: Great Divide beer and cookie pairing

January 24th: Westfax beer and cookie pairing

February 2nd: De Steeg’s 5 year anniversary beer and cookie pairing

Baking with Bananas

Banana bread is delicious, right? I love it. My mom always bakes banana bread with chocolate chips in them and it’s always so amazing. Recently, I had some bananas that seriously needed to be used (I’m really picky when it comes to eating bananas – they have to be absolutely perfect so they basically are only good to eat by themselves for an hour out of their whole banana lives) and I thought I would make banana bread but THEN!!! I thought I should bake banana bread cookies. Which turned into banana cookies. Which then turned into banana cream pie cookies. Which lead to one of the greatest cookies that I’ve made so far. Introducing the Banana Cream Cookie.

It’s incredible. Using bananas mashed up instead of eggs, this cookie is healthier for you and it tastes amazing. You can ask my friends, I made a lot of people try it. At first I was skeptical, the cookies don’t look done because bananas don’t provide the same color that eggs provide cookies. The center was very moist and immediately I thought they were undercooked, but it’s just the banana giving it that texture. Once the cookies cooled – and even for days after – the cookies are still soft and have this very strong banana flavor to them.

I’m going to suggest the next time you have bananas laying around that need to be utilized to try baking cookies. Banana is a great alternative to eggs making it vegan-friendly, which is super important these days with all the vegans runnin’ around.

What kind of baking adjustments have you made before? If you had to use banana in a recipe what would you bake?!

GOOD sugar

How often do you think about your daily sugar intake? To be honest, I don’t think about mine very frequently; I don’t track anything that I should be tracking. I know that as I get older I should be tracking certain things like sugar, cholesterol, gluten, etc., but I just don’t. The next time you eat a cookie or order dessert at a restaurant, think of these benefits of sugar to make your belly feel a little bit better.

1. Sugar comes from natural resources. Without using pesticides and other harmful products, the sugar that you eat is not harmful to the environment.
2. Your skin benefits from sugar. Glycolic acid helps maintain the health of your skin by eliminating blemishes and restoring the balance in the skin’s oil.
3. Feeling sleepy? Sugar provides your body with the lack of energy that you need to get through a rough day because of its high caloric count.
4. If you’re feeling down in the dump, sugar is like a “high” in your brain. Although it’s a temporary feeling, sometimes that’s all you need for the rest of your day!

However, always remember the key to good health is moderation. The American Heart Association reports that most Americans consume an average of 22 grams of added sugar per day, much higher than the recommended 6 teaspoons for women and 9 teaspoons for men.