When bad things (me) happen to good bread.
Recently I printed off All Recipes' 20 top-rated recipes (once a recipe has 1,600 reviews posted, you'd think people would stop adding their two cents but everybody's got something to say, I guess) and I thought I'd work my way through them one at a time, kicking off with Banana Sour Cream Bread because I had a bunch of bananas moldering on the kitchen counter.
Problem: the recipe is huge. It makes four small-ish loaves for gift-giving and holidays. I don't need that much banana bread no matter how good it promises to be and sure, I could have frozen a few loaves for later but stuff that goes into my freezer tends to stay in the freezer. Somewhere. I'm not really sure. I put stuff in there. It gets pushed to the back. I find it years later looking like a anciently frosty woolly mammoth ear like the ones people occasionally unearth in potato fields here.
A few of the reviewers said they cut the recipe in half and just baked one large-ish loaf and so I took my cue from them one evening after work. As I poured the batter into the pan, I thought: "I dunno this seems like alot of batter for one pan maybe I should split this into two pans..." But I soldiered on because I trust in the allrecipes reviewer and even more because the couch and my glass of wine and Dexter were calling to me to assume a horizontal position in front of the tv.
Turns out, I should have listened to my inner batter judge because:
Instead of rising into a plump loaf, the batter just kept oozing over the sides and onto the baking sheet I had the forethought to put the pan on. My husband took one look at it and delightedly whipped out his camera, having spent so much time impatiently watching me take photos of pretty food before he was allowed to touch it. I named it lava bread and we gigglingly wished we were having guests over for dinner so that we could set this monstrosity out on the table, just to see what they'd say when they saw it.
Some food bloggers would never post a photo like this but I am not like them because I have no pride.
But it should be noted that we did eat parts of the 'bread,' if you can call it that. The crispy bits on the edges were quite tasty but we avoided the jiggly middle.
