Adventures in late night baking.

"I'm going to make chocolate banana bread when we get back," I announced at 10:15 p.m. That's right: P to the Mizzo, as in right after we got back from our dog walk.

The reason for all the late nightery was that (a) I read a recipe several days ago for double chocolate banana bread. I confess to you that regular old banana bread moves me not in the least. For one thing, it tastes like overripe bananas, which is the state you generally want your bananas in for banana breadery. So no: I will never look at old bananas and think: why don't I make you into banana bread? I will straight up throw those bananas out, true story. Not that I'm proud of it or anything. But chocolate banana bread? That had some possibilities.

Also, (b), I happened to have some bananas. Which had been (c) sitting around all weekend, looking like potential chocolate banana bread material. Did I want them to get brown and bespeckled? No I did not. But they were fully yellow, which by 10:15 p.m. last night seemed ripe enough for the baking.

We got back from the dog walk (beautiful sky full of brilliant stars) and I threw off my jacket and got out the bowl. The double of the double chocolate was first, cocoa powder and second, chocolate chunks. I happened to have a sad, past-its-expiration-date bar of semisweet baking chocolate in my refrigerator that was just the ticket for the chunks--I bashed it up with my chef knife until the pieces broke, then stirred them into the batter. The bananas tasted fresh and not gushy, so: perfect.

While it was in the oven, we did this and that. I graded a discussion and read some more material about last night's epic episode of The Good Wife (spoiler alert: I'm not going to say one damn thing about it). The house filled with the most divine smell ever, dark and cacao-saturated and fresh fresh fresh bananas. Beautiful.

I went to check it at the appointed hour. Found my toothpicks for checking doneness. Done.

I grabbed the hot pad that was directly at hand. Stiff, this hot pad was. Stiff, not to say unyielding. Okay, to say: unyielding.

The people, that pan fell straight out of my useless hot-padded hand and onto the floor.

Did I utter an oath? Of course I did. And then fetched a spatula and scooped it, as if it were pancakes on a griddle, back into the pan. And ate a little bit of the hot ruin whilst doing so. OMG.

It is the best banana bread I have ever baked. I cooled it on a baking sheet and put it in a Tupperware, and right now I am eating a bowl of it, broken into pieces and topped with vanilla ice cream.