Music: Mount Wittenburg Orca by the Dirty Projectors and Bjork (Sorry Mike, not De La Soul) This album is pretty crazy. It’s a collaboration between the Dirty Projectors and Bjork. The songs mostly sound like ideas of songs that haven’t been finished yet but it’s definitely worth listening to. The Dirty Projectors ladies and Bjork are all super technical singers. Lots of fun.
Baking: Fried Chocolate Chip Banana Bread with Homemade Caramel Sauce
We decided to make this recipe because it is incredibly southern and unhealthy, which meant it had a 100% chance of being delicious. It’s kind of like bananas foster but instead of frying bananas you fry banana bread. Unfortunately, we also didn’t light anything on fire. At least not on purpose. As an intense lover of banana bread I was excited for this one.
We started with my standard banana bread recipe, which is memorized at this point.
Dry ingredients:
1 1/4 cup flour
3/4 cup granulated sugar
1 1/4 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon
Wet ingredients:
2 mashed very ripe bananas
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 cup melted butter
The banana bread batter poised for baking
Fold wet into dry (Don’t over-mix! Never!) Then add as many chocolate chips as you want, which for us was a lot (approximately 1 1/2 cups). I live by the philosophy that there can never be too much chocolate. We poured the batter into a buttered and floured loaf pan and baked it for 55 minutes in a 350-degree oven.
While the banana bread was baking we started on the caramel sauce. Caramel sauce is a little tough to make, mostly because the timing has to be right for everything. We put 1 cup of sugar in a 2 qt. heavy-bottomed saucepan and then placed 6 tablespoons of butter and 1/2 cup of heavy cream near the stove.
Melted sugar about to boil and become delicious caramel
We put the pan of sugar over heat and whisked it until the sugar melted and eventually boiled. When the sugar boils, you put the butter in and stir it once it’s melted. Then you take it off the heat and pour in the heavy cream. The mixture will bubble up a lot, and you keep stirring it until it becomes smooth. Voila! Caramel!
Mike slicing the warm bread with loving kindness
Once it was done, we took the banana bread out of the oven, and then hungrily watched it cool. Once it had cooled off a bit (probably not long enough but we were hungry and excited) we cut 1-inch slices and heat up some (a lot) of butter in a pan. Probably like 2 tablespoons of butter. This r amount ecipe is all about butter, like chocolate, you can never have too much. This is where it gets delicious. We lovingly set the slices of banana bread in the pan of butter and fried them like pancakes until they got a little brown. Finally we served the bread with ice cream drizzled with a substantial of caramel sauce.
The finished product
Let the devouring ensue! Everyone in the room was very happy with this one, it was gone within minutes.
