Sometimes I feel like I’m gonna get really healthy and eat a bunch of fruit n stuff, so I’ll buy some bananas and eat like ONE. Fast forward a week, and I have two really nasty looking bananas. Instead of throwing them away, I decide to make Renee’s banana nut bread. When I lived with Renee, she would make one loaf with nuts and one with chocolate chips to satisfy the needs of the household. In 2008, I asked her for the recipe. This is the first time I ever tried to use it. I decide to go crazy and make one with chocolate chips AND NUTS.
So I wait until my bananas are REEAAALLLY RIPE. Like fully 100% brown on the outside. And then I get crazybusy with my art show deadline. Then Lisa Fulmer tells me to freeze them nanners, so I do. Then I defrost them in the fridge, and they leak out their BANANA ESSENCE all over the fridge, which looks like maple syrup and which I clean up and don’t tell Hairy about. I wonder if my bananas have begun to ferment, because they are really slimy, like so slimy it almost makes me want to barf when I free them from their blackened skins. But I still use them. So what if they are fermenting? That will just make banana bread FOR GROWN UPS, and I am one of those!
I am not a chef. I am not a baker. I want some banana nut bread, I don’t know what I’m doing, I make some stuff up, and IDGAF.
Search your email from 2008 for Renee’s sour cream banana bread recipe. Discover that Renee’s delicious bread is from this recipe at AllRecipes.com. What! SIX BANANAS? WHAT ABOUT TWO!? Renee has made notes for a 2/3 recipe, so all you have to do is 1/2 that one (maths!).
Your ingredients look like this:
- 1/4 cup Earth Balance fake butter stuff (cuz that’s what’s in the fridge)
- 1 cup white sugar
- 1 egg
- 2 crazy ripe banana slime aliens that require no further mashing as they are nearly liquid form
- a little more than 1/2 of an 8 oz container of sour cream
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
- 1/6 teaspoon salt which means a SMIDGEful
- 1 teaspoons baking soda – which you don’t have. So you put in 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder, which you do have, and seem to recall that baking powder contains baking soda, so it can’t be THAT wrong……right?…. IDGAF
- 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
- 1/2 cup chocolate chips
- 1/2 cup …. wait for it …. HAZELNUTS! AW YEAH! GO CRAZY, HAZELNUTS! YOU LOVE HAZELNUTS! They are your favorite nut. Nobody else is eating this banana nut bread except you, cuz everybody hates banana bread, so you get to pick whatever nuts you want!
First things first.
Preheat the oven to 300 degrees.
Grease and sprinkle a sugar/cinnamon mixture onto your loaf pans. You’re using mini loaf pans cuz that’s what was in the baking-stuff drawer.
Cream the butter and the sugar. You actually remembered to leave the “butter” out to soften while you had dinner with Manda. You’re doing a great job! So what if you keep hearing Rihanna sing “We found love in a hopeless place” in your head, cuz you watched the MTV VMA’s last night, but you replace the words with something like, “You are no baker, you’re a hopeless case.”
Add the egg, bananagoo, sour cream, vanilla, and cinnamon. Stir that shizz up! Combine the flour, salt, and baking soda in a bowl. This is when you realize you don’t have baking soda and use baking powder instead. You know your bread won’t rise correctly, but, whatever, nobody else is eating this, nobody’s gonna judge you, nobody’s gonna care. It’s all for you. It’s all about YOU. AND YOU DGAF.
You’re probably letting the batter mix too long because you’re busy snapping photos of said batter. Your batter is probably getting glutenous and gluey, and you’ll probably be baking banana nut bricks. But it’s gonna be okay.
So what if you BROKE A SPOON while scraping the sides of your mixing bowl? You have other spoons!
You have so many freaking spoons, that you are going to use ANOTHER spoon to BASH SOME NUTS WITH. BASH DEM NUTS, GIRL!
Throw your nuts and your chocolate chips into the batter.
We like it CHUNKY!!! Then pour your batter into your loafy tins.
Then pop those suckers in the oven! The original recipe calls for 1 hour in the oven, but since you are using mini pans, you have no idea how long to put them into the oven. Google tells you that 40 mins is probably necessary, but check in on them around 20 mins. Bee tee dubs, that toothpick trick never works for you. The toothpick is always clean. You ask Hairy for some help. He does not seem happy. Plus he is judging you about the baking powder thing. HE IS NOT GOING TO EAT THE BREAD SO DON’T LISTEN TO HIM.
Now you can wash off your face mask and wash your dishes. There’s also time to have a savory snack and make a cup of tea.
Here’s the fun part!!! Watching your loaves rise! You know they won’t rise correctly due to the baking powder / baking soda debacle, and they are rising very cubically with flat tops. They are kind of like sponges, or those little rubbery dinosaurs that you put in water and watch grow and they never change shape. Don’t mind the loaf on the right. That one is dead because you and Hairy poked and prodded it with a knife after the whole toothpick thing.
40 minutes later and they are ready to be born! They are not the right color. They are kind of pale and not as toasty and brown as you recall banana bread being, but they are definitely cooked, so you think it’s time for them to come out.
Since you did such an awesome job greasing and sugaring the pans, and since your banana bricks are so dense and glued together internally, you can pluck them straight out of the pans with your hands and plop them onto a cooling rack!
YOU DID IT! You made yourself a treat….and a weapon! ENJOY!
p.s. Yes, it is a million times tastier when Renee makes it, but you gave it your best, and 11 year old Ryan Gosling approves. Adult Ryan Gosling…probably not so much.
