Dessert #2: Chocolate chip banana cake

I know I said chocolate chip scones, but it turned out my recipe resource did NOT send me the recipe (yet. Fingers crossed.) so I had to bake something else for my detoxing purposes. One of my roommates had four bananas that were no longer, shall we say, in their prime. SO I looked up a recipe for banana cake and substituted the nuts (not my favorite thing) for chocolate chips (definitely my favorite thing) and left off the frosting. I practically filled my one cooking pan and it came out DELICIOUS!!!!

 [I know the picture's not that beautiful, it's just kind of brown with chocolate chip dots in it. You'll have to take my word for it that the inside was perfect and moist and the outside was just the right amount of crunchy and not burnt at all.]

Recipe: 
2/3 cup pecans or walnuts (Do not like. Did not use.)
1 1/2 cups (3 sticks) unsalted butter, softened to rm temp., more for greasing
1 cup sugar
1 cup brown sugar
3 bananas
3 lg. eggs
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour + 2 tsp for dusting
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
3 tbsp buttermilk (I literally just use butter and milk, because what IS buttermilk, anyway?)
1/2 tsp vanilla extract


Oven rack in middle. Preheat to 350. Do stuff to the nuts. Generously rub the bottom and sides of a 9 cup bundt pan with butter (clearly, I used a 9 x 13 inch pan, because...well, that's all I have here at school). Add 2 tsp flour and swirl around, coating buttered surfaces. Set aside.
Put butter and sugars in large bowl, beat with electric mixer (/wooden spoon) until smooth and creamy. Cut bananas in chunks, add to butter-sugar mixture and mix until well incorporated (this part is fun). Add eggs, one at a time, and mix until well incorporated (This part is slimy). Add flour, baking soda, salt, buttermilk, and vanilla and mix until blended. Do not mix battter too much, or cake will be tough. Stir in pecans or walnuts by hand (or chocolate chips, if you are me). 
Spoon evenly into pan, bake 50-55 min or until top is firm and brown and toothpick (or fork) comes out clean. Let cool. Obviously.


I am seriously scoring this semester in the recipes I use/mess with. I am also getting mad good at the actual baking part of baking. I am much better at telling by looking when things are done. And (knock on wood) I haven't burnt a single thing yet! Why, you ask, do I consider this such a huge accomplishment when I've only made two desserts? Good point, fair reader.



...


because I've made THREE!

The banana cake was all but gone within a day after I made it (which I did on Friday, by the way) and then on Sunday my a cappella group went apple picking to bond with our new members. My boyfriend and roommates and I bonded particularly well with one of the girls (for some reason that came out sounding dirty. I swear it's not.), who came back to the apartment with us and collaborated in making....



APPLE CRISP!

Unfortunately, I cannot convey smell through my camera. But if I could, your mouths would be watering. All gazillion of you who read this. Ha. Ha ha. Anyway.

More on the smell: I haven't anticipated anything coming out of the oven this much since I was a kid, back when time slowed down colossally when your mom made cookies and you had missed licking the spoon because she forgot to give it to you and washed the bowl and you would have done many scary things, like walk around in the basement without lights on, to make the cookies bake faster...but I digress.

The cool thing about the apple crisp coming out so well was that we sort of made up the recipe. I mean, I found this one online:

EASY APPLE CRISP 

6 to 8 med. apples, peeled and sliced
1 c. sugar
1 c. flour
1 egg
6 tbsp. softened butter
Cinnamon sprinkle

Slice apples in bottom of 13x9x2 inch pan (ungreased). In bowl, mix sugar, flour, egg and butter until crumbly. Sprinkle on top, covering sliced apples. Lightly garnish with cinnamon sprinkle (if desired). Bake at 350 degrees for 1 hour (until golden brown).

but then we realized that it doesn't call for either brown sugar or vanilla, both of which we felt were crucial. So I halved the sugar and made it half brown and half regular, and added about a teaspoon of vanilla. Also, one of my roommates has oats. A lot of oats. So we dumped in some of those too. And I was pretty liberal with the instruction "cinnamon sprinkle." All in all, deliciosity ensued.