Banana-Walnut Shortbread

I'm not that crazy over brownies, and so I've decided to skip the TWD event this week. But I still want to bake something from Dorie's book, and since I've got a bunch of ripe bananas sitting in the kitchen, I thought it would be nice to use them to bake a white and black banana loaf, which is taken from page 232 of the book. But the cake turned out to be a flop. The batter was so runny and curdly that I had a bad feeling when I put the baking pan into the oven. After close to 2 hours of baking, and the cake had all the typical signs that it's cooked, you know, the sides of cake pull away from the pan, skewer inserted into the cake turned out clean etc. But the cake ended up in the trash can because it was not fully cooked at all.

After that unfortunate incident, I used the remaining bananas to bake some banana-walnut shortbreads. I started to bake around midnight and I was nibbling non-stop whenever there is a batch of cookies freshly out of the oven. I felt very guilty over the amount of calories consumed, especially when it was already so late at night. Anyway, the recipe is fantastic, the cookies tasted so good that I might bake again very soon.


Banana-Walnut Shortbread Recipe
(Adapted from here)

Ingredients:
3/4 cup butter
1/2 cup mashed ripe banana (1 1/2 bananas)
1 tsp vanilla
2 1/4 cups whole wheat flour
3/4 cup packed brown sugar
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
2/3 cup finely chopped toasted walnuts
Maple icing
Dried banana chips (optional)

Method:
1) Beat butter, banana and vanilla in a bowl with an electric mixer until smooth. Cover and chill in the fridge for 1-2 hours.
2) Preheat oven to 300 deg F. Combine flour, sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg in a large bowl. Cut in butter mixture until mixture resembles find crumbs and starts to cling together.
3) Add in chopped nuts and knead until smooth. Form dough into a ball and divide into half.
4) Roll one portion of dough on a flat surface, with thickness of 5mm. You might want to lightly flour the counter top before rolling the dough, but I omit this step because the dough did not stick to the surface at all.
5) Using a square cookie cutter, cut out pieces of dough and place on cookie sheet.
6) Bake in preheated oven for 25 to 30 minutes, or just until the bottom begin to brown. Transfer the cookies to wire racks and let cool. Drizzle with maple icing and if desired, top with banana chips. Makes about 60.

Maple icing: Stir together 1 1/2 cups icing sugar, 1 to 2 tablespoons of milk and 2 tablespoon of maple syrup and a bowl to make an icing of drizzling consistency. Add more icing sugar if it is too runny. Makes 1/2 cup.