What happened to the banana bread?

I don't know about you but I can't throw out brown bananas. They have to be turned into bread. I usually just toss them in the fridge until I can bake.

So last Saturday was the day. I was just going to make my basic recipe - everything was good until I realized we were out of milk. Plan B. Find a recipe that doesn't call for milk because I was in my pajamas and did not want to get dressed to go to the store for milk on Saturday morning.

My La Brea Bakery cookbook has such a recipe. Excellent. Except that it also called for some ingredients that I didn't have - like nuts. Lots of nuts. But here's the deal, I usually leave the nuts out anyway because Don and Elli don't like it with nuts. So I thought no big deal, I'll leave them out. It also called for light brown sugar and I only had dark brown. So I altered a few things. I probably should have thought a little more about what deleting the nuts might do. But I really didn't give it a thought. So you can imagine my surprise when I opened the oven door and saw the sad, pock marked loaf in the oven.

Holy cow. It looks like petrified banana bread!

What the heck? What happened to the banana bread? It looks like something from a nuclear disaster!

Perhaps all the recipe alterations were not a good idea?  Maybe Nancy had nuts in the batter for a reason? Uh yeah, pretty sure she did. Cuz this poor sad loaf of banana bread is not what she had in mind. I guarantee that.

So then I sliced it open! Eeeeks! There's an egg inside! Not really.

That is not an egg in the middle.

The recipe calls for you to take one banana, slice it in half down the middle, and lay it on top of the batter before you bake it. I envisioned the banana sitting pretty on top with sugar caramelized on top. Ha. Ha. Ha. That's not exactly what happened. The banana sank into the cake so when you sliced into it it looked like a raw egg was in the middle. Very odd and oozy.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. I am not a recipe creator. I'm a recipe follower. I should not be altering recipes. I am not good at it.

But don't despair!  This is a good news bad news story. The bread looked horrible. But tasted awesome. So it wasn't a complete throw-it-in-the-trash disaster. But very, very close.

I apologize to Nancy Silverton of La Brea Bakery. I promise I've had way more successes than failures. I'm sure it's not your recipe. But here's the GREAT news. This banana bread tasted FAN-TASTIC the next day. The banana kind of melted in the middle and was like banana frosting. At least that's how it tasted to me. PLUS, it didn't look nearly as prehistoric. So there go. Wasn't really a disaster after all.