Books and Baking Banana Bread for Brunch

Earlier in the week I saw this recipe for chocolate peanut butter banana bread, and was intrigued. I shared it to Facebook, and the reaction from my friends ranged between also intrigued and concerned. My friend Sean expressed doubt about the flavor combination, and I pointed out that peanut butter and banana sandwiches were Elvis' favorite.

And also killed him.

Technically, that's probably more the fault of the sandwich preparation than it is the fault of the flavor combination. After all, according to the potholders for sale at the Graceland gift shop, every sandwich took an entire stick of butter.



That's why Elvis is dead. Four or five sticks of butter a day.

Anyway, by a happy coincidence I had some friends coming in from out of town this weekend, and they rented an entire house from Airbnb and invited many of us to brunch today. This offered the perfect opportunity to bake the bread but then not have the bread hanging around my house waiting to be eaten all week, so this morning I got to work.

When cooking anything, I like to take out all of the ingredients first, and then put them away as I go.



I bought those bananas, the ripest ones at the store, on Wednesday so that they would be soft by this morning. After preheating the oven, I mixed up the dry ingredients:



then mashed up the bananas:



and mixed everything together:



and put it in a bread loaf pan:



and popped it into the oven for an hour.

While it's cooking, let's talk about the books I read in February, since it's also the end of the month. I only made it through two books this month, mostly because things were busy at work and I was often too tired when I got home to stay up and read.

The month started with the news that Mary Higgins Clark passed away, and I realized I had Death Wears a Beauty Mask on my shelf of unread books. It's a short story collection featuring the title novella and other stories, some of which are interesting, but some of which seem like they could have used a little more work. Overall, the collection was a mixed bag, but reading it still felt like a nice sendoff to a beloved author. I've been reading Mary Higgins Clark's books since I was in high school, when I received several of them in a box of books my grandmother gave me. While my library has been a little pared down over the years, I still have all of those.

The other book I read this month was a reread of Donna Tartt's The Secret History, one of my all time favorite books in the world. Throughout the month of February I tried to figure out if I was rereading the book because I was melancholy, or if I was melancholy because I was reading the book, but that may be an unanswerable question.

Enough about books, though, because the bread was done:



I think I might need to lower the racks in my oven, because the top of that is really brown and I think it might be too close to the heating element. By the time I got it to the house and sliced it, though, it seemed fine:



and my friends ate all of it.

I brought home an empty loaf pan.