Second-Stab Saturday: More banana cake!

A lot of bananas have passed through the kitchen recently, and they all went brown at the same time. And so, for the second time in a short time, we are making this banana cake recipe that lets us turn five nearly-rotten bananas into cake. Most banana bread recipes only use two or three, but we had a lot more bananas than that which we urgently needed to use. Well, technically we could freeze them for another day, but why do that when you can have dessert?

Mrs. Kahn's Banana Sour Cream Cake       Mix and set aside: 2 tbsp butter, melted ½ c sugar 2 tsp cinnamon ½ tsp salt ½ c chopped nuts* 1 or 2 bananas, sliced (add the bananas after everything else is mixed)       Cake: 3 bananas ½ c sour cream 1½ tsp salt ½ c butter, softened 1 c sugar 1 tsp baking powder 1 tsp baking soda 2 eggs 1½ c all-purpose flour ½ c whole-wheat flour Heat oven to 350°. Grease a 9" square pan. For the cake, blenderize the bananas, sour cream, and salt. Set aside. Cream the butter, sugar, baking powder, and baking soda until light and fluffy. Beat in the eggs, one at a time. Alternately add the flour and the blender mixture, starting and ending with flour. Pour about half the batter, perhaps a little more, into the pan. Sprinkle with half the banana slice-sugar-cinnamon mixture. Repeat these layers. If extra cinnamon-sugar remains in the bowl, scatter it in large drops across the cake. Bake for 30 minutes, or until a toothpick in the center comes out clean. *I left these out, but if you like nuts in cakes you will likely do otherwise. Note: This cake really fills the pan. If you bake this in a smaller pan than a 9" square, you will have excess batter. Have a cupcake pan ready. When I used a 9" round instead, I had enough batter to make six cupcakes. Source: adapted from a recipe by Ruth (Mrs. David) Kahn, 1973 Detroit-area newspaper clipping via Mid-Century Menu

You may be wondering: what is so different about this recipe this time? What makes it so unlike the last time you made it that you're posting it again? The recipe-altering difference lies in the measuring cup shown below.

Yes indeed, we're adding whole-wheat flour! The brown flour, especially when combined with the bananas (which as we all know are a great source of potassium), allows us to pretend this is good for you. Since this cake will have five bananas in it, it's practically a fruit salad with whole grains thrown in for extra dieters' points.
In all seriousness, we thought that the cake needed a little extra flavor kick. The brown sugar nuggets and banana slices interspersed throughout were great, but the actual cake was a little... well... flat. The banana flavor came though wonderfully, and it was in that perfect spot between dense and airy, but the only flavor in the cake itself was sweetened bananas. Yes, we can add spices and the like, but this seemed like it needed some earthy undertones in it. So we added just enough brown flour to change the taste. After all, we've been doing whole-wheat swaps with brownies for a while (often replacing all of the flour and not just part of it). No one has complained, though a few people have said that they have a little extra I-don't-know-what to them. The flavor of whole-wheat just seems to go well with a lot of things put into desserts. If you think I'm batty in saying so, consider that whole wheat flour is the main ingredient in graham crackers, and those grace the underside of many a pie and cheesecake.
In making this recipe, we learned that Mrs. Ruth Kahn was not kidding when she said to use a square pan. The cake batter barely fit in this round pan before it had been in the oven long enough to rise.

Keep in mind this is only half the batter. We're supposed to sprinkle a layer of bananas and then pour the rest in.

We hastily rummaged through the cabinets trying to find something bigger than this but smaller than the massive sheet pan. This odd-size rectangle was the best we came up with. I don't have a ruler at hand, but the long side of the pan is about the same as the short side of a sheet of copy paper. The batter came up a little bit higher than we'd have liked, but hopefully it still had enough room to rise without spilling over and burning on the bottom of the oven.

As you can see, this pan barely held the cake. Had I done a good job of scraping the bowl into the pan, we would have had some serious overflow in the oven and a very smoky kitchen. It is well known that I usually don't get out the rubber spatula until after the baked creation is in the oven. While I always love to eat cake batter, rarely has licking the spoon saved me from cleaning the oven.

In case you think I'm being dramatic, let's get a good closeup of the edges of this pan. As you can see, if it had contained any more cake batter it would certainly have dripped over and smoked up the oven. This kitchen is unfortunately open to the rest of the house, so the resulting smoke would have spilled over into the living room, and from there up the stairs, and become part of the house's atmosphere for at least a week.

I'm still not sure I like the look of sliced bananas on this cake. After baking, they look weird and dried-out. They taste really good after baking in cake batter and turn marvelously creamy, but they look... er... bad. We may cut them into semicircles next time so they look less... like this.

With that said, this cake is amazing. The whole-wheat flour added just enough extra flavor to give it what it was missing. We will note that when others entered the kitchen and saw a dripping mixing bowl on the counter and Mrs. Kahn's recipe taped on the cabinet above, excitement filled the kitchen. "You're making that one again??" That's how good this cake is.

Mrs. Kahn's Banana Sour Cream Cake

We at A Book of Cookrye have been forced to alter our grocery habits. Because we live within walking distance of a grocery store (even if it's so hot that we must drive there so we can be air-conditioned for the entire six-block journey), we used to just pop in for one or two things every other night. Obviously, with a plague on, such frequent public excursions are no longer well-advised. Now, we are discovering that we are very bad at planning two weeks of meals and getting groceries for them in one expensive expedition. And so, among other things, we had a lot of bananas nearing the end of their edible lives.

This recipe comes to us from Mid-Century Menu, and ultimately from someone who had precisely the same problem we do now! I love how they even say she was "determined that the garbage disposal wouldn't claim them." I totally support this attitude, Ruth Kahn. Now, on Mid-Century Menu, she noted that the cake needed just a little bit of salt to bring out the flavor. She also noted that she's made this recipe multiple times.

Mrs. Kahn's Banana Sour Cream Cake       Mix and set aside: 2 tbsp butter, melted ½ c sugar 2 tsp cinnamon ½ tsp salt ½ c chopped nuts* 1 or 2 bananas, sliced (add the bananas after everything else is mixed.)       Cake: 3 bananas ½ c sour cream 1½ tsp salt ½ c butter, softened 1 c sugar 1 tsp baking powder 1 tsp baking soda 2 eggs 2 c all-purpose flour Heat oven to 350°. Grease an 9" square pan. For the cake, blenderize the bananas, sour cream, and salt. Set aside. Cream the butter, sugar, baking powder, and baking soda until light and fluffy. Beat in the eggs, one at a time. Alternately add the flour and the blender mixture, starting and ending with flour. Pour about half the batter, perhaps a little more, into the pan. Sprinkle with half the banana slice-sugar-cinnamon mixture. Repeat these layers. If extra cinnamon-sugar remains in the bowl, scatter it in large drops across the cake. Bake for 30 minutes, or until a toothpick in the center comes out clean. *I left these out, but if you like nuts in cakes you will likely do otherwise. Note: This cake really fills the pan. If you bake this in a smaller pan than a 9" square, you will have excess batter. Have a cupcake pan ready. When I used a 9" round instead, I had enough batter to make six cupcakes. Source: Ruth (Mrs. David) Kahn, 1973 Detroit-area newspaper clipping via Mid-Century Menu

Let's look at this line from the note above the recipe:

Our Pieathlon friend Poppy Crocker has often noted that here in America, there is a blurry or even nonexistent divide between salads and desserts. Often the same recipe will say to serve on a lettuce leaf for salad or without for dessert. Or perhaps it will say "reduce sugar from 2 cups to 1½ to serve as a salad." Here in America there is a similar, if not even more obvious, merging of breakfast and dessert. We never thought about this this until some of our friends from other countries reported their surprise at seeing cakes and cookies renamed buns and scones and then served for breakfast. And that's before we get into muffins (which these days are cake- we've even had iced muffins for a long time now) and cinnamon rolls. Does a healthy breakfast ever ooze with cream cheese icing?
And so, let us start this off the way we have started so many things of late: with butter!

I have to give Ruth Kahn credit: she does not skimp on spices. That is a massive pile of cinnamon in this bowl, and we did not err on the side of generous when measuring it.

It looks a bit unnervingly greasy due to the fact that we melted the butter (which I guess will make it easier to sprinkle and scatter over the cake batter later on), but there is so much cinnamon it looks like brown sugar with extra molasses. It was almost (but not quite) hot from the extreme concentration of that brown powder, which meant it would still be wonderfully spicy when dispersed throughout the cake.

And now we get to the first of the bananas! I practically never slice bananas for anything, so this step felt oddly like preparing food for small children.

Looks like a delicious fruit compote, doesn't it?

Now, Mrs. Kahn devised this recipe to turn wasted fruit into delicious cake, and we are going to follow in her spirit.
We have previously mentioned that if you keep your fruit in the main part of your refrigerator rather than the fruit drawer, it will dry out rather than go moldy. And here is the proof: these strawberries have not even the slightest coat of fuzz on them! There were a few more in the container when we found it, but we ate them. We intended to eat only one to make sure they tasted good, but  they were so nice we wanted a few more. You may think they would acquire the taste of an old refrigerator, but instead they tasted just like those expensive dried strawberries you see with artistic labeling on them.

We decided to cut the strawberries up very small so we could be sure they would soften up while baking.
We also had these blueberries that were just starting to desiccate. They didn't yet look like raisins, but they had become mushy.

And here's all the lovely fruit, marinating in sugar and enough cinnamon to make the whole kitchen smell like spice cake before we even turned on the oven. We figured that once it was baked, it would be impossible to tell that the fruit was ever so subprime. 

I think a lot of people now forget that baked fruit recipes were a very common way to make sure you use up the squishier things you never got around to eating. Instead, we purchase the most perfect-looking, exquisitely-ripe  peaches and apples so we can bake them into pies.

If you thought we had dealt with all the bananas in the recipe, you are mistaken. You know how we said we had a lot of bananas? Well, we not only had a lot of them sitting on the counter getting browner every day, but we also had even more in the freezer that we had stashed away recently before they became too rotten to repurpose. As they thawed, they exuded a weird, transparent, syrupy substance.

As you can see, it's sort of pink and about the same consistency as pancake syrup. We first didn't know whether to drain it away or keep it. But we figured that it was in the bananas when we froze them and would never have separated out had the bananas not entered the freezer. Therefore, whatever this banana syrup is would have gone into our cake had we just plucked the bananas off the counter rather than storing them in what used to be the icemaker tray before the icemaker broke. And so, it went into the blender along with the shrunken remains of the bananas from whence it came.

Unsealing the sour cream gave us pause. There was enough pressure to turn the seal into a hard dome. We were afraid it would pop open like a can of biscuits. 

We didn't think this was a lot of banana, but it fills up the (admittedly small) blender. I've seen a lot of people say they like the taste of banana bread but not the lumpiness. If this includes you, then Mrs. Ruth Kahn is your banana bread kindred spirit. By the time the blender is done with these, the banana bread will be as light and lump-free as when we did the same thing with plantains.

Looks like a milkshake, doesn't it? That stubborn white smear of sour cream that refused to blenderize with everything else just makes it look like one of the things you get from a coffee shop that involves a blender, ice, and a squirt of whipped cream on top.

Actually, the banana-sour cream blenderization tasted better than we thought. It was slightly sweet and just a little tangy, very much like when one blenderizes fruit and unsweetened yogurt. We could have put some ice cubes in there and very much liked it.
And so, having done the advanced prepwork, we can finally get to the mixing of cake!

We're off to a great start.

We've been gradually breaking every wood spoon in this kitchen. No matter how many times we are assured that the spoons were like 20 years old and ready to depart this earth, we still feel bad every time we have to look over to our friends and hold up a severed piece of spoon in each hand. There was a cute vase of them next to the stove where they were arranged like flowers. Now only one or two survivors remain, and I fear they may be short-lived.

We were a bit unnerved at how grayish the bananas had become while in the blender, and had to taste them to make sure they still tasted like bananas.  Perhaps the acidity of the sour cream caused a reaction with them that changed the color. Or maybe they're just very whipped up.

If we ignore the banana-sugar-cinnamon stuff  we did, this is a pretty basic recipe for banana bread. With that said, it's a very good one. Or at least, the batter was really good.

I don't know what it is, but when cake batter looks like a swirl of ice cream when it goes in the pan, the cake is almost always better than when your cake batter is thin and runny. Also, this tasted fantastic- the sour cream didn't add as loud a flavor difference as I expected, but the batter tasted just a smidge richer for having it.

And here we get to the real banana-saving part of this recipe: having added as many blenderized bananas as we can before the cake won't bake right, we just drop the rest of them into the cake. We're of course also adding the blueberries which we wanted to save from the trash as much as the bananas.

I'm guessing Mrs. Ruth Kahn does this two-layered sprinkling of fruit because it sinks a bit while baking. Had we just stirred it in, it would probably all go to the bottom of the pan. And then the extra layer on top of this is in case the stuff in the middle does completely sink- that way, there will be at least some delicous things dispersed throughout the cake instead of sticking to the bottom of the pan.

We had a hard time spreading the second layer of batter on top. But we figured if we got it sort of close to even, everything would level out while baking. Seeing all these splats of stuff really does make this look less like baking and more like an elementary-school art project, doesn't it?

And here it is, ready to eat! I'm not sure that I like those baked banana slices on top. They don't look very... nice. Instead they just look shrivelled and squished. But we plucked one off the top and they tasted so nice that I didn't care anymore. (Is it a surprise that the banana slices were good after marinating in sugar and baking in cake batter?)

This cake turned out a lot lighter than we usually get with banana bread. I think it's blenderizing the bananas that does it- we had the same fluffiness when we blenderized the plantains and made bread out of them. The banana slices became marvelously creamy while baking. The sour cream became imperceptible while it baked, but we're going to guess that the baking soda fizzed with it and made the cake rise even higher.
If you are staring at a lot of bananas and realizing you'll never eat them fast enough (or if the dark and spotty ones are extremely discounted at the grocery store), try this and you'll be glad you did. If we were making any improvements, we might replace about a half cup of the flour with whole-wheat to add a subtle nuttiness to everything.

Banana Yeast Bread: or, Banana bread that is not also dessert

Today, we at A Book of Cookrye are sharing an interesting idea we had: what happens when you put bananas instead of sugar into yeast bread? Make no mistake, we do love banana bread. Why else would we have made it so many times? This time, we wondered what would happen if you made a banana bread that doesn't become a cake just because you made it in a cake pan. So we had the bright idea of just putting it into a yeast dough recipe and seeing what would happen. We consulted our new favorite cookbook (we fell in love with it when we saw the battered cover) and found...

Anniversary Slovak-American Cook Book, First Catholic Slovak Ladies' Union, 1952

This recipe seemed perfect for inserting bananas because it has mashed potatoes. We have no familiarity with altering bread recipes, so we were afraid that just dumping mashed bananas into an otherwise normal recipe would ruin it in unforeseen ways. But swapping mashed bananas for mashed spuds seemed reasonably safe.

Banana Yeast Bread 1 c banana (packed firmly into the cup when measuring) 1 c warm water ½ packet yeast (if you don't know when you'd use the rest, just use the whole thing) 1 pinch sugar 4 c flour 1½ tsp salt 3 tbsp fat 1 or 2 tbsp milk Mix the sugar, water, and yeast. Set aside 5 minutes to make sure it foams and that the yeast is alive. Thoroughly blenderize the yeast-water and the banana. In a large bowl, mix 3½ c flour with the salt. Rub in the fat with your fingertips until it's thoroughly mixed. Add the banana mixture. Mix well, adding the remaining flour as needed if it's too goopy. Knead until springy and elastic. Cover with a wet cloth or paper towel (don't hang it over the top of the bowl, lay it directly on top of the dough and press it firmly onto its surface). Refrigerate for a few hours, or up to a few days. When ready to bake, take the dough out, punch it down if it's risen any, and put it in a warm place. Let it rise until double in height. Roll the dough into small balls, and place them on a greased baking sheet. If the dough is too runny and/or sticky to shape into rolls, you can either divide it among muffin cups or put all of it in a loaf pan. Brush the tops of the rolls with milk. If you have no brush, you can pour a splash of milk across the top and quickly spread it with your finger before it has time to soak in. Let rise. Bake at 350° until thoroughly done. Be careful- when you do any of the doneness tests (thumping it to see if it sounds hollow, pressing it to see if it springs back, etc), it may seem completely done but still be doughy in the middle. I even stuck a toothpick in the center and it came out dry, yet the center of the bread was still just hot dough. Find or borrow a meat thermometer and insert it so the tip is in the center of the bread (make sure it's also about halfway between the top and bottom). It should read about 195°. This bread reheats very nicely the next day in the microwave. adapted from a recipe by Louise Zaremba (of Joliet, Illinois), Anniversary Slovak-American Cook Book, First Catholic Slovak Ladies' Union, 1952

In our happy theory, using mashed bananas instead of mashed potatoes would make this a slightly-sweet bread with an interesting subtle flavor that you don't get from adding a bit of extra sugar. But first, we had to obtain yeast for this endeavor. In ordinary times, we'd have just gone out to buy some. But yeast has gotten as scarce as the good toilet paper. We did some very very deep digging into the back of the pantry and found this. I turned on the date-stamp on the camera just to emphasize how many years it has lain dormant and unbaked.

In normal times, we'd have thrown this out in a decluttering spree, but in this plague we are more vigilant than ever about holding onto every dusty seasoning packet and can of pickled carp fillets. You just never know when the next shortage will strike, or what will go scarce. And as there was no yeast to be had in the store, it was this yeast (which has reached age of consent in some jurisdictions) or nothing.
We almost always test yeast in warm water before baking, but it's hitherto always been a formality. We've never had any reason to believe the yeast was dead. But today, we put it in water with fervent hope instead of bland certainty. We even gave the yeast a packet of sugar (pocketed from some coffee shop years ago and kept in a container with many just like it- because we would surely use it someday) hoping that food would wake it up.

And so, we sprinkled the yeast over the warm, slightly-sugared water, wondering if we had merely moistened a packet of corpses.

Yes, there are some bubbles already in the water, but that's just from frothing it up a bit while stirring.

A minute elapsed, and we glanced back into the glass. Was the yeast alive and foaming, or were we merely seeing their dead remains separate and spread out into the water? 

I'm sure you already guessed the happy result. We wouldn't have announced banana bread only to write that the yeast was dead and we cancelled the recipe. The yeast looked lifeless for quite a long time, but every time we glanced at it we thought it might have changed a little bit. But eventually it decided to look happy and lively, and we were thrilled to get out the rest of the ingredients and (hopefully) make some delightful bread.

It's aliiiiiiiiiiiive!

In a normal world, bread is one of the cheapest things you can make. But in a normal world, flour is cheap and easy to find. These days, the grocery store is like a perpetual night-before-Thanksgiving. Aisles that normally are ignored (the baking aisle, the toilet paper aisle, the spice rack) are suddenly swamped and ravaged, leaving bare shelves and the remains of package-ripping carnage. I'm amazed that we have this flour at hand to make bread out of. You'd think we'd be rationing it by the tablespoon for white sauce and brown gravy, but we have enough flour to use two pints of it (that's an entire quart of flour) in a recipe without even knowing if it will work.

And now, we get to our mashed "potatoes." We didn't actually get out a fork and mash the bananas, we just broke them into measuring-cup lengths and shoved them in there. Yes, there are some large pieces of banana embedded in there, but that didn't matter, as you will see.

And this is why I didn't even bother cutting the bananas up. We are bringing out the power tools to do the work for us. This blender has been surprisingly resilient. Sure, it smells like burning electricity and sounds overloaded whenever you make it pulverize even the mushiest of foods, but it keeps not dying.  

Meanwhile in another pan, things look more like a normal recipe. Incidentally, butter is as plentiful as ever. Not that I'm complaining about fully-stocked butter, but doesn't everyone suddenly trying home baking (note if this includes you: welcome to the wonderful world of bread and cake! Be sure to lick the rubber spatula!) want butter to spread on their homemade creations?

Well, we say it looks normal, but really it looks like the beginning of a normal pie crust. Incidentally, I had considered making this with whole-wheat flour, but that is just about impossible to get this month. This unfortunately means that we can't try to pretend this is healthy. Yes, it has two bananas in it, but I don't know anyone who's ever gotten slim and trim from putting blueberries into muffin batter. They all were happy and sated though.

Speaking of bananas, it is time to add them! Yes, the blender has turned them into a splat the color of a 1970s economy car, but the appearance did not unnerve us. In baking, we've only ever seen bananas in three places: pudding, cream pie, and bread that is so sweet it's basically a cake. This is the first time we've ever baked anything that doesn't surround the bananas in a dessert's worth of sugar. This, therefore, is an experiment: do bananas taste different when you bake them? If so, are they any good without heavy sweetening?

We were hoping we would be able to dump the extra flour, unused, back into the sack for another time. After all, flour is as scarce as face masks right now. However, what should have been a kneadable bread dough was in fact this sticky mess.

We added the rest of the flour and like a miracle, the dough turned into a sticky un-kneadable mess to a sticky, barely-kneadable one. It took a long time to get it to look like this semi-cohesive mass. If you liked squishing Play-Doh more than sculpting it, this recipe is for you. To make things go a bit more nicely, I was not alone in the kitchen. So this wasn't a long ordeal of dough-kneading, but just absently slapping the dough between my hands while conversing.
As you can see, the dough is still hopelessly sticky, but it seems to want to hold a shape instead of just slowly dripping through my fingers. We thought that perhaps if we were very careful-handed in shaping it and used a lot of flour, it might actually turn into the rolls we would have gotten had we actually followed the recipe.

At this point, we figured this bread was a kneaded as it could get, so we shoved it under a wet shop towel and left it in the refrigerator. It later occurred to us: is the blue dye they use in these things food-safe?

We then had a minor problem. As shown above, our hands were a hopeless sticky mess. They needed not just a quick wash but a hard scouring. We happened to know that in this kitchen, a scrub brush resides in the drawer of random implements. However, our hands were so covered in the floury ooze that we could not extract it without smearing what felt like flour-based flypaper adhesive onto half the things in the drawer. We had to call for help and literally ask "Could you take that object out of the drawer and hand it to me?"

As we learned when trying out a handwritten bread recipe in the back of a cookbook, if you let your yeast dough just sit in the refrigerator for a few hours, it starts to taste a lot better. The yeast flavor gets so much stronger since the yeast has more time to eat the sugar and turn it into all the things that make yeast bread taste so nice. We nearly didn't do that with this batch of dough because we feared that the yeast would at any time remember that it's supposed to be dead. Of course, yeast has no memory that we know of, but we also worried that our little microscopic bread friends would finally die of old age before the dough was ready to bake.
Reassuringly, the dough looked just a teeny bit puffed-up after we took it out of the refrigerator, as it should. The dough continues rising very slowly even in the cold. While one doesn't need to use a massive bowl to allow room for expansion, the dough does get just a tiny bit enlarged. So, after being awakened from a long slumber and put through a blender, it looked like our yeasts were still fit to make our bread lovely and light!

We squished the dough flat and put it in a barely-warm oven to rise. Sure enough, this yeast that had needed such a long time to come to life earlier today had become so lively that the dough rose with delightful speed. I almost felt bad at taking this yeast, which has survived so long and still been so vigorous, and baking it.

You know how we managed to knead this dough into something that, while extremely sticky and messy, could at least be shaped into rolls? It turns out that the long refrigerated rest followed by the long time rising has made it even runnier than before. This dough was too goopy to shape into rolls. And if we did manage it, the dough would run and spread out into flat patties anyway.

We thought to ourselves, why not make bread muffins? Those are always a cute way to serve bread. This dough was going to need as much help holding a shape as cake batter, and muffins seemed like an adorable way to give it the support of a pan. But this is the only muffin pan we found in the house.

These small cupcake pans mystify me, especially when they're so old. Who only makes six cupcakes at a time? How deep did you have to dig for extra-small-batch cupcake recipes, especially in the years before the internet made it possible to quickly look up "recipes to serve one"? You might say that this pan is for when you've already baked most of your batter in the big 12- or 18-cup pan,  and you're scraping off the bottom of the bowl. But why would you get out a second pan? You're only going to have to wash it afterward along with the big one that was already dirty.
Well, we certainly were not going to wait for these to rise and bake if we can only make 6 at a time. This fun bread experiment would turn into a 10-hour ordeal by gluten. We rummaged further into the cabinets and found a loaf pan to just dump the dough into so we could bake it all at once and be done with it.

We were thinking about putting an egg wash on top of this. It'd add a nice glaze to it. But if you've ever used an egg wash, you know that you barely use any of the egg for it unless you're brushing it over a lot of bread. We have previously mentioned how irksome it is to dump most of an egg down the drain just so you can get an aesthetically-appealing shine on your baked goods. You can avoid waste by just putting the rest of the egg in a small frying pan and scrambling it for a quick snack, or you can (if you're the sort of person who's so organized they always know exactly what's going on in their refrigerator) freeze the extra for future bread batches. We at A Book of Cookrye decided to just pour out a tiny splash of milk to brush on top instead. In baking class, they mentioned milk wash as an option, and (with a slightly contemptuous undertone) said it had a more "homemade" and "unprofessional" look. As it happens, I don't care how unprofessional my banana bread looks, so here we are.

You could glaze the top of the bread with those last few drops that didn't come out of the milk carton.

This baked for nearly an hour. We had planned on serving bread with dinner, but we had to cancel that because we were not going to let dinner dry out on the stove while telling everyone to shut up and wait until the bread was ready at some undetermined time in the future. Eventually, when we gave the bread a good thump, it sounded hollow. When we jammed a toothpick in there, it came out dry. The bread was golden on top and (theoretically) ready.

We began to suspect that the bread was in fact not ready (despite testing positive for doneness) when we saw how pale it looked on the sides. Sure, the sides are fully cooked, but they didn't look.... finished somehow.

Sure enough, when we sliced the bread open, there was a core of hot dough spanning the length of the loaf. We hastily put it back in the oven. But how would we make very sure the bread was baked?
Well, as it happens, one of our friends surprised us with a thermometer! When one of the many mail-order packages arrived (like most people, we've been doing a lot more mail-order of late), he handed the unopened box over with "I think this is yours."
I haven't gotten this much of a surprise since a friend of mine I visit a lot had to get his house rewired. He specifically ordered wall outlets with USB plugs because I always have a dead phone battery and no charger.

This bread is measurably done.

And here's the finished bread! We are now very certain that it's baked because we jammed a thermometer in there and verified it. It got so dark I almost feared we burned it.

You can also see where we didn't manage to get the milk wash all the way to the edges.

As you can see, there is no raw dough in there! It only took an hour and a half to finally get this baked. After all the runniness, the mess, the stickiness, the random detours with a blender, the yeast that's older than most teenagers, and other misadventures, I was surprised to see that it looked so much like actual bread when we cut into it.

If you look under the wrapping, you can see that the bottom and sides are also nicely browned. This bread turned out so very lovely and right.

Now, when we first got the dough mixed up and ready for its afternoon in the refrigerator next to the pickles, it had a very slight sweetness to it (after all, the yeasts needed to eat something). The bread dough wasn't Hawaiian-roll sweet, but just ever-so-slightly so. That sweetness was quite gone by the time these were baked, leaving behind a lovely, rich bread. There was a slight banana flavor underneath, but not enough to make one think "Bananas!". The banana taste was just strong enough to add a subtle I-don't-know-what-this-is-but-it's-rather-nice extra flavor. It turns out that once the sweetness is gone from bananas, the remaining taste is really interesting and complex. When we mixed that with the lovely flavors of yeast bread, it was absolutely delicious.
In the future, when it's easy to get flour again, I will definitely be trying this again with whole-wheat. The flavors already in the bread seemed like they'd go really well with whole-wheat flour instead of white. Also, we could eat massive hunks of it without feeling bad.

This bread was also really sturdy. It'd be great with soups or with anything that has a lot of sauce that you'd want to sop up. Its rich flavor would complement it and make it so much nicer.