The experiment

I’m making banana bread. This is my first venture in baking since the Great Chocolate Chip Cookie Incident of 1995. It wasn’t
a pretty sight. I got the recipe from dear old Dawn, my oldest sister. It is as follows:

2 eggs
1 cup white sugar
1/2 cup butter or margarine
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
4 large bananas, peeled and mashed
2 cups white flour
1 cup ground walnuts (optional)

1. Beat eggs, sugar, and butter until blended and fluffy.
2. Add vanilla, slat, baking soda, and bananas. Mix.
3. Stir in flour and nuts (optional).
4. Grease and flour lightly a bread loaf pan or an 8×8 or 9×9 cake pan. 5. Pour batter into pan.
6. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
7. Bake 60 minutes or until knife in center comes out clean.

Seems simple, right? I thought so too until I had all the ingredients in the bowl before I finished reading the directions and realized there were actual steps in mixing the stuff. There are also issues with the fact that every single measuring tool we own is metric. So I cranked out a few online conversions and think the proportions are what they’re supposed to be.

I’ve got doubts in my mind whether or not the baking soda I used was actually baking soda. It’s in Portuguese, obviously, and the letters didn’t remotely resemble anything that could be baking soda by the farthest stretch of the imagination. On the other hand, the flour I used looked more like baking soda than the baking soda. I doubled the batch. That means I may have four cups of baking soda in this batch. Is that considered a health hazard? Or even eatable? Coincidentally, the Detachment is having a bake sale in the next 12 hours and I may just put my experiments on the table to sell. If someone dies or something, I can point fingers at one of the many people who are sure to donate cakes and pies and such for the event. No one will ever know. It’s been about 25 minutes since I placed it in the oven. I’m wracked with anticipation. I’ll keep you posted.

Banana bread update – 01:27

I was not aware that banana bread rose during baking. No one told me this, nor was it in the directions. I fear I have severely underestimated the size of the pans required. There’s a button on the front of the oven that reads “Conv bake.” Should I have used this button? But I’m not baking “convs.” I’m baking banana bread. “Convs” must be common here because it is a local oven. Weird Brazilians. As of yet my banana bread does not possess or exhibit a delicious looking, golden brown top. Add “did something horribly wrong somewhere” to my list of fears.

Time is up – 01:44

I just completed the knife test. I wouldn’t use the word “clean” in describing how the knife came out. It was a bit dirty. Even a bit buttery looking. I blame this on my guess work when converting the butter measurement. The top seems to be bypassing the golden brown stage and heading directly to seared, Mars landscape stage. I see no visible signs of batter on the knife, hence I will remove the prototypes from the oven. God save us all and have mercy on my soul.

The results are in – 02:11

Success! Somehow I managed to produce a couple of superb cake-style sections of banana bread. They’re cooling on the counter top as I type. Tomorrow I’m going to apply the vanilla frosting that I dug up from the cupboard. I may or may not test taste them. I’ve got a lot of bananas left over from the beach party we had a week and a half ago so I can always make more. But looks can be deceiving. Marines, for the most part, are not picky eaters. I think I’ll try it out on them…

* My six-hours-of-sleep rule was foiled yesterday morning. My alarm went off and I slept right through it… to the tune of ten hours. See? My body takes what it needs. The study continues.

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