Banana jelly

too custardy even for me

A few posts ago I described Shirley Corriher as "wizardly," an assessment based on having read CookWise and BakeWise, but never actually testing one of the recipes.

I baked her banana bread yesterday, the one that involves folding whipped cream into the batter. The first glitch I noticed was her specification of a pan (8 x 4.5) into which the batter would not fit.

So I buttered and floured and parchmented another, larger pan. Then I filled it with the batter and put it atop a hot baking stone in the oven, per her directions.

After her specified baking time (a suspiciously short 35 minutes), the bread was still jiggling under a  thin, pallid crust. So I baked it for another 30 minutes after which it was still wobbly, so I left it in for another 10 minutes. When the bread seemed firm and tested done with a toothpick, I took it out. Let it cool. Cut it. It was like a block of jelly. Not precisely underbaked, but strange. Like it had been steamed or I had forgotten to add flour. Which I hadn't.

I refrigerated the loaf overnight and ate a piece for breakfast and it was tasty, but you would not serve this bread to anyone outside your own family. I found this disillusioning thread on amazon which confirms my fears about BakeWise. I really did believe that Corriher was a wizard and that in BakeWise I had a masterful book of spells! Sad.

Day before yesterday, the goats finally breached the fence between our yard and our neighbors' yard. We love our neighbors. Joan is in her seventies, Bill in his eighties, and they go on epic camping trips in the Nevada backcountry and grow a beautiful vegetable garden that I can see from the window right now. The goats topped the chard, so now there are some red stalks sticking up in the air. They didn't eat all of the chard. As Joan put it, "They just had a little hors d'oeuvre."

Needless to say, we felt terrible and are going to rebuild the fence so this doesn't happen again.  Joan told me that she would accept as compensation for the chard any leftover baked goods my family doesn't eat.

Well, my family isn't going to eat this banana bread, and neither is Joan. This loaf is for the chickens.