So. I might have a few self-control issues to address. This would explain why, after everything was winding down for the evening last night and I had settled down to review options for my desserts of the week for work, I found myself in the kitchen at 10:00 p.m., shaking powdered sugar out of kitchen towels. I honestly did not set out to make pumpkin roll. But the glossy pictures of roulades in the Martha Stewart Magazine were so … shiny … and tasty looking. After internally throwing around the idea of getting up in the morning to whip a few out before working on my calculus homework, I began doing some basic prep. It was already 8:30, too late to start mixing anything, so I would just mix together the dry ingredients, bring up the canned pumpkin from the pantry, bring in the cream cheese from the garage refrigerator and stop there. But after that, the spices smelled lovely, as spices generally do, double checking the baking time on the cake revealed that it would only take fifteen minutes and I could always roll the warm cakes, wrap them, and leave the filling for the morning. So it went, and I continued to rationalize away the time consumption until I ended up with this.

Roulades, while delightful to make and view, have generally fallen flat flavor-wise for me. This recipe, however, using whole eggs, walnuts, and pumpkin wrapped around cream cheese, sugar, and butter, is as delightful as it is fattening. Left in the refrigerator or freezer overnight and the cream cheese sinks into the cake slightly, keeping it moist and sticky. The moistness of the cake also helps eliminate the cracking so common to this kind of cake, as most of the small fissures meld back together during the chilling period. While the recipe itself is similar to one found on the Libby’s brand pumpkin, our recipe card, typed, yellowed, and handed down from my great-grandmother, makes it feel more special. And, now that I’ve timed myself and determined that it can be made, complete with kitchen clean-up and breaks to watch some of the more spectacularly silly scenes of ‘The Swan Princess’, in an hour-and-a-half, I think it’s safe to say that it’s also a fairly simple dessert, with impressive looking results.

Now that I’m on my own for making food choices, I’m still willing to “try at least one bite” of any food I come across, so their methods seem to have worked well. My openness towards most foods has only been exacerbated by time spent in kitchens with lots of overtime and little space for lunch breaks. During the busiest seasons it’s easy to get used to eating the imperfect remnants and less-than-stellar experiments because there’s no time to look for anything else.

Which is a rather wordy way to work up to excusing the fact that I have discovered that I am, in fact, quite picky about some things. I’m picky about carrot cake, and cream cheese frosting. I’m picky about tomato soup, and I’m picky about macaroni and cheese. But the only thing that really concerns this post is that I’m picky about banana bread.

I didn’t know I cared so strongly about it for years. I grew up making basic banana breads from my mother’s staple cookbooks and knew that I liked them. I usually threw nuts into half of the batter, for my father’s sake, and left the other half plain (my personal preference). The add-in nuts were always walnuts, the bread was always baked in loaf pans and very rarely lasted longer than a day. It took me a long time to learn that it’s often more aromatically in-your-face banana flavored on day two.

And then I discovered the internet, and thrift store cookbooks, and all the crazy, intricate things that people do to basic foods. It happens to everything, it seems, this dialing up of ingredients. I understand the urge, since I, too, like to push the envelope of flavor combinations, toppings, and mix-ins. But I’ve tried it with banana bread so many times that I’m willing to admit something. I don’t think the original can be improved.

At least ingredient wise. I’ve come across a few tips and techniques that make the basics shine to their fullest ability and I regularly put those into use. But chocolate chips and nuts and spices and bourbon and all their kin feel like gilding the lily on this one. I like my banana bread with sweet cream butter, white refined sugar, and vanilla. I’ve baked it in sheets, squares, muffins, and rounds and I am prepared to testify that it tastes better in the classic loaf form.

I felt guilty this afternoon, mixing up a plain Jane batch of a recipe I’ve made more times than I can count, so I threw a coconut streusel lid on it and tossed a touch of ginger and cinnamon into the mix. It is fall after all. The end result isn’t bad, in fact it’s quite tasty, but it isn’t an improvement over the basic recipe. So here’s the best recipe for banana bread that I have ever experimented with, in all its stubbornly perfect simplicity.

Banana Bread (from The Olives Dessert Table)

3 bananas – that hopefully look something like this

1 1/4 cups sugar
1/3 pound melted butter
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
1 1/2 cups flour
1/2 tsp salt
1 1/2 tsps baking soda

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and grease a 9 inch loaf pan.

Combine the bananas and sugar by beating at high speed for as long as your patience allows, somewhere between 3-10 minutes. Stir in the butter, eggs, and vanilla, then add in the flour, salt, and baking soda. Pour into the prepared loaf pan and bake until a toothpick poked into the center of the bread comes out clean (this takes about an hour in my oven). Cool in the pan for 15 minutes and then turn out. I find that the flavor deepens over time and think that banana bread tastes best cold, but that never stops me from eating the first half of the loaf while it’s still steaming on my cutting board.

If you still don’t believe me about the lack of need for a streusel, here’s the recipe for that little extra touch.

Oatmeal Crumble (adapted, loosely, from The Olives Dessert Table)

1/2 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 stick softened butter
6 TBSP flour
pinch salt
1/2 cup sweetened coconut flakes
2/3 cup ground walnuts
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp ginger

Rub all ingredients together until the mixture looks sandy and the butter is evenly distributed. Sprinkle thickly over the top of your banana bread just before baking. (This recipe was the perfect amount for a double recipe of bread, or two loaves. If you have extra, it’s a great fruit topping.)

I love cakes, particularly grand layer cakes that can be cut open to reveal strata of frosting and fillings. I’m always a bit disappointed in anyone who doesn’t want a birthday cake, claiming a preference for ice cream cakes, or pies, or some other alternative dessert. (Apologies to all my family members who fit in this category). Which probably helps explain a little why I make my own birthday cakes.

Despite the reactions this statement often garners, it isn’t from any stuck-up notion that I’m the only one who can make good cake, or because there isn’t anyone around willing to make me a cake. I feel no cake oppression. I also tend to make cake for other people’s birthdays. And weddings. And random movie nights. And assorted other cake worthy events. Between the people I know and my stints in the professional pastry world, I’ve had the opportunity to make at lot of cakes in the past ten years. But my birthday is my chance to cobble together all the flavors, techniques, and textures that I have been hoarding in my head, waiting for a chance to experiment with.

Sometimes this works out well, sometimes the result tastes not so amazing, and sometimes it’s everything I was dreaming. Okay, so I imagine that one day I will make a cake that’s everything I was dreaming of. I don’t think it’s happened yet, but I’m not bothered by this missing achievement.

It actually fits well with a quote I read recently, “have no fear of perfection, you’ll never reach it anyways.” It’s possible to read that pessimistically, I know, but I appreciate the idea that there will always be something more to strive toward. Absolute perfection seems like something that has to be left alone and I like poking at things and adjusting this and modifying that. Sometimes I have to be reminded to work toward perfection instead of just bouncing from project to project, but I think the knowledge from a million different tasks can all come together to help create something that may not be perfect, but is better than it would have been before.

So I count this year’s Brown Butter Maple Pear Spice Cake with Coffee Cream Cheese Cardamom Frosting a success. And since it was eaten down to the last crumb in less than a week, I think everyone who got a chance at it agrees.

And now I get to sit here and decide what kind of cake to make next.

It went something like this….

Wake up after a hot August week to the sound of thunder and pattering rain dumping on the metal roof. Open all the windows to let the fresh scents in, feed the dog, feed the cat, cook a couple of sunny-side-up eggs for the husband, start the tea kettle, consider the breakfast options. Realize there are four peaches aging in a not entirely graceful manner in the fridge and pull them out. Consider making peach cobbler, peach crisp, peach pie, poached peaches, or something else. Give up on knowing what’s going on and start slicing up the fruit. Peel half of it before getting bored with the process and leaving the skin on the other half. Toss the peach chunks in a few tablespoons of cinnamon and sugar, set them aside. Think vaguely of crepes and blintzes, crack an egg into a bowl and cut about 4 oz of cream cheese over it. Start stirring it together, develop butterfingers and juggle the bowl in mid-air for a slow-motion minute before watching it crash onto the floor and tip over. Rescue the top layer and let the dog happily lick up the slick of raw egg on the vinyl. Begin again, cream cheese in a bowl, this time beating it with a bit of granulated sugar before mixing in the egg. Add three to four teaspoons of cornstarch to the peach mixture and divide it into five ramekins. Pour the cheesecake mixture over the peaches, decide that the ramekins are perfect for cobbler after all and pull out a recipe for sour cream coffeecake. Mentally divide it by four, rounding the numbers here and there to keep things simple. Squeeze the last dollops of sour cream out of the tube, then add heavy cream until the measuring cup’s contents match the needs of the recipe. Ignore the recipe and melt the butter, because it’s easier to mix everything in one bowl. Use a tablespoon measure to estimate 1/4 tsp amounts, because it’s not like anything else in this mixture is measured precisely. Add a few shakes of uncalled for nutmeg, because it’s a cloudy day, and nutmeg is delicious. Taste the batter and add a few more shakes. Spread across the top of the peach/cream cheese mixture, sealing it up as much as possible, and pop into a 350 degree oven for 17 minutes. Check the color of the coffee cake mix, decide it needs a bit more and let it cook for another 4 minutes. Loosen the edges of the topping with a table knife and invert into a bowl. Admire the way the cream cheese has formed a sauce around the warm, jammy peaches while the coffee cake is a steamy, fluffy island beneath them. Devour while admiring the success of the experiment. Remember to write down what happened so that someday, it could happen again.

It’s similar to when my husband and I were picking out what type of Parmesan cheese we wanted to buy for our pasta. Our local grocery store carries a good variety of parm these days, ranging from pretty good, to decent, all the way down to powdered. And even though if I were objectively tasting the cheeses, I would say that fresh shaved Parmesan from a block is more delicious, we came away with a plastic jar of the shelf stable powerded cheese. Why? Because it tastes like my childhood. It’s hard to not feel a bit pretentious when you’re making a staple food for a weeknight meal and still insist on all the highest quality ingredients.

I know I’m not the only eater and writer to feel this way. I’ve read many essays on guilty pleasures and food that everyone knows is objectively horrible, but perfect in the moment. And we’re not just talking about junk food, which can be bad for you and taste delicious at the same time. What I’m referring to are those foods that would never win a blind taste test, but carry enough weight of nostalgia to make them win out over food with protected designation of origin and a pedigree older than the nation of America.

Sometimes I get frustrated with recipe writers, who are all so insistent that you use the highest quality this and the most expensive that for their recipes. Does it make a noticeable difference to use best quality ingredients? Of course it does. But do I have the budget to source 100 year old balsamic every time I’m trying a new recipe with that particular vinegar? Of course not! I admit, I have had the opportunity to try such a balsamic, while I was working in a Colorado ski village, and it was amazing. A tiny bottle, with its own miniature cork, a small pamphlet of certification, the ceremonial application of a single drop to a tasting spoon, it all lent itself to the arcane and impressive experience. But that balsamic isn’t one of the food memories that I bounce back to on a regular basis.

So next time you’re reading a chocolate chip cookie recipe and getting stressed over whether you need to make a run to the co-op to buy single origin block chocolate, just think back to your vacation food memories and remember that food can’t be distilled into a simple evaluation of flavor. Location, people, and the memories made with food are bigger factors than its exclusivity and in the end, it’s more about the experience than the taste.

P.S. I don’t always manage to be so low key about vacation food. Read about past adventures in cabin cooking in my Daily Improvisations guest post.

It seems like chefs always have one of two backgrounds, either they had to learn to cook in order to discover good food, or they were raised in the midst of kitchens and turned to cooking as a career in order to keep their worlds food-focused. My own foundations in cooking started young – as soon as I could pull a stool up to the counter and watch, my mother started portioning off small bits of bread dough for me to knead and turn into mini-loaves. To this day, if someone corners me and asks what my desert island food is, I say fresh-baked bread.

My early food experiences weren’t just bread, though. They were also picking radishes out of the garden pathways and eating them fresh out-of-hand, marathon applesauce canning that always included eating the extra still warm with plenty of cinnamon and sugar, and watching my father pull all the leftover dishes from the refrigerator and turn them into something fresh and new.

After earning my degree in Culinary Arts, I’ve spent ten years working in professional kitchens, logging valuable time with each of my foundations skills until I don’t even realize that the task I am performing is a skill. Peeling carrots, chopping onions (your eyes stop watering after the first gallon or so), folding biscuit dough, browning butter, and juggling timelines until it all comes together in the culminating adrenaline rush of working the hot line during the busy hours.

In between professional catering jobs, I’ve managed food for a sister’s wedding, for my own wedding, for birthday parties, card parties, dinner parties, and quiet family dinners. Slowly, I’ve discovered what skills and techniques are most helpful to transfer over from the professional world and which are best left behind. I know what I miss the most when I’m at home (the ovens are always pre-heated at work), and what I miss the least (I’m about 97% more likely to find a properly fitted pot lid at home).

Now I’m stretching my meal-planning skills, scaling down my prep to feed my new family of two, focusing on budgets and nutrition, and still finding ways to keep food an adventure.

Yesterday, however, I sank to a new low. Last week, I purchased the necessary ingredients for baking brownies, feeling that I might have need of therapeutic baking in the near future. Yesterday, I took advantage of my foresight and used baking therapy to create a batch of brownies to be used as chocolate therapy. It was a very calming experience, it’s true, and I washed all my mixing bowl and wooden spoon immediately afterward in an extremely mature and prompt manner. We won’t discuss how many times I licked my fingers during that process, since that’s irrelevant, really. I condensed the 9×13 pan worth of batter into a single 9″ cake round, since that was the closest baking dish I had handy, and when it was finished baking, I …. well, I took a fork and ate them straight from the pan.

I don’t want to mislead you, I’ve eaten brownies from the pan before. When made at home, they will frequently sit out on the counter with a cookie spatula in the pan for quick and easy access. But there is still a pretense of civilized behavior, as we cut out a square of brownie and separate it from the remaining block of chocolate fudginess. Yesterday, I devolved past pretense. It was me, cross-legged on the bed, and the pan of chocolate in my lap. My first bites were dug directly out of the center of the pan and I didn’t stop until there was an Australia shaped hole. Looking back, I’m shocked to recall how far I fell – not even eating in a regular polygon shape.

But it gets worse still. Yesterday I wanted brownies for lunch, but I resisted, instead consuming an entire head of steamed broccoli before allowing myself to move on to the chocolate. This morning, upon awakening, even those inhibitions had dissolved and, still pajama’d, hair uncombed, bed unmade, I once more fell upon the brownies. I ate around the edges, I ate from the inside edges, there was no pattern or reason behind my attack.

Now you know the embarrassing tale of my chocolate-driven de-evolution. I am a living warning – the stuff is not safe. Each episode with this batch of brownies has taken me further down the dark hole of the etiquette-less. I look back and remember that I was reading Miss Manner’s Guide to Proper Behavior only a few short months ago and blush at how far I have fallen. And, like a dark cloud at the edge of my consciousness, is the remainder of the pan, sitting in my room, calling to me. Next time, I might not even remember to use the fork.

P.S. – If you want my favorite go-to brownie recipe, click here.

My first attempt to fulfill this spur-of-the-moment commitment (I have several of these in my life at the moment – the most time consuming being the running of a half-marathon in October) focused on using on-hand ingredients and short preparation time. I started with Smitten Kitchen’s version of the Pioneer Woman’s sour cream pancakes, because it’s my preferred recipe for making my own individual breakfast pancakes. I considered starting with an actual peanut butter pancake recipe, but the first few I browsed through said they had a faint or light peanut butter flavor, which was not my end goal.

Have we reached semantic satiation for the word pancake yet? No? How about peanut butter? Still no? Let’s carry on then. Short preparation time didn’t become important for prototype pancake batch A until I nudged my iPad into snooze repeats for about an hour on the morning I planned to griddle up. This was not entirely due to laziness on my part – I had a traumatic encounter with the device earlier this week when attempting to shut off the alarm and since I have never injured myself when simply asking it to check back with me in nine minutes, snooze now seems like the safer option when I’m half-asleep.

However it came about, I found myself with a self-imposed pancaking deadline and so I stuck to the basics with my prototype recipe.

First, I retrieved my mixing bowl from the back seat of the car, where it has been living in peaceful harmony with a larger mixing bowl, a cooling rack, and my bicycle since my arrival in Wyoming a month ago. Then, in my private philosophy chamber, I whisked together:

1 egg
1/2 tsp vanilla
1/4 cup milk, soured with 1/2 t of cider vinegar
3/8 cup peanut butter, crunchy

Here we arrive at the first tenet of the Peanut Butter Pancake Philosophy – all peanut butter that enters a Peanut Butter Pancake Mixing Bowl must be CRUNCHY. I cannot explain this, I simply know it to be so. Deviate at your own peril.

Over the top of this mixture, I sprinkled:

3 TBSP unbleached white flour
1 TBSP granulated sugar
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt

And stirred the whole of it together with a wooden spoon. Use of wooden spoons in mixing is not a tenet of the Peanut Butter Pancake Philosophy, but all elite Peanut Butter Pancake Philosophers use them. You may make of this what you will.

After the batter had come together nicely, I was forced to leave the philosophy chamber to heat a non-stick frying pan with a little oil over a medium-high heat. The non-stickiness of the pan and the electric stovetop were counter to my preferences, but I made do with what was actually available to me. I dropped the batter in approximately 1/8 cup portions and spread it out slightly with a spoon, as it was too thick to settle on its own. Hopefully, I will be able to address this issue in prototype pancake batch B.

The final yield of the one-egg recipe was six palm-sized pancakes, with a soft crumb and pronounced peanut butter taste. I had a moment of concern when I first applied my pancake batter to the frying pan, as it occurred to me that I might simply be frying peanut butter cookie dough, but the texture of the end result was decidedly more pancakey than cookie-ish.

Retreating to the privacy of my philosophy chamber; I ate the entire batch, to prove that it was indeed a single-person sized recipe, and waited an hour before heading out on my half-marathon training run. I feel that even with the wait time, the execution of my Peanut Butter Pancake Philosophy commitment did weigh me down somewhat as I executed my half-marathon training commitment, but with some closer attention to scheduling details I should be able to avoid future conflicts of this nature.

Keep checking back to see more of my impromptu commitments and learn the second tenet of Peanut Butter Pancake Philosophy. Until then, experiment on your own to find your personal point of semantic satiation for the key words pancake, peanut, and butter. I will be reflecting on the fleeting nature of pancakes in the philosophy chamber.