If There Is Smoke.....Alison Must Be Baking

I had a bunch of gnarly brown bananas to use up, so I decided to put them to good use in banana bread for Craig to bring to work tomorrow.
Because I like to make things difficult, I opted for something different than the standard, yet quite tasty banana bread. I decided to go with cream cheese banana bread with streusel topping and chocolate chip banana bread with peanut butter glaze.
I've made them both before with great success, so it is safe to say that I did not anticipate the greatest banana bread overflow of all time.

After I had put both loaves in the oven and washed the pile of dishes that accumulated due to my ambitious baking plans, Craig called to tell me that Billy Mays, the OxyClean guy, died. As we were concluding that all that yelling Billy Mays did may have led to his untimely demise, and vowing to talk a little lower ourselves, I turned on the oven light to check the bread's progress. I'm glad I checked because the cream cheese banana bread was pouring like molten lava over the side of the loaf pan. I quickly grabbed a cookie sheet to position under the pan to catch anymore drippings and carefully scraped the crunchy burned bits off the rack and from the bottom of my already very dirty oven.
I made the same recipe in the same pan before so I'm a bit puzzled by this messy turn of events. I'm just glad I caught it before the kitchen filled with billowing smoke. We had a small amount of smoke to contend with, nothing I haven't dealt with in the past, but an even bigger problem was the smell of burning sugar.

I hate when things don't turn out the way I want them to. I'm such a perfectionist and often feel like I'd rather throw something away than serve people something I'm not proud of. Craig would be rightly annoyed if I did that so I'll refrain from chucking the whole loaf, but it's going to take a lot of effort for me to not pick at, scrutinize and hover over that stupid loaf of bread. I took it out of the oven and it appears to have survived, but I did pick off the extra crunchy burned bits of streusel around the corners of the pan.
I removed the loaves from the pans and covered them with a towel to keep me from going back and obsessing.

We'll see how that works out.

I guess I should have anticipated some sort of disaster as it seems as if today is a day of multiple kitchen oopsies.
Besides the overflowing banana loaf, I also almost killed another blender this morning. Thankfully the blender survived, but my smoothie ended up down the drain. This time the culprit was a little rubber spatula I stuck inside my green smoothie mixture, as it was blending, to get the spinach to fully incorporate. I tried to fish out the rubber pieces so I wouldn't have to chuck the whole smoothie, but the spatula was green and camouflaged nicely in my green smoothie.
I don't know about you, but drinking mutilated bits of rubber isn't my sort of thing. Of course, drinking liquefied spinach isn't many people's idea of a good time either.


I still have dinner to make so I hope I don't have to deal with the triple crown of kitchen disasters. Oh, who am I kidding. While I'd like to think I'm competent in the kitchen, clumsiness abounds. I burn myself, drop knives on my bare feet and sometimes give a spoon a whirl in the garbage disposal.

On a completely unrelated note, my precious kid is neurotic too! The antibiotic she is taking comes with a very specific set of instructions: take one hour before or two hours after a meal with no dairy and do not lay down for 30 minutes after dosage.
Friday night I gave her the medicine at 8pm. Shortly after she went to take a bath. As I was helping her wash her hair, I prompted her to lay back so I could rinse out the soap. She asked me what time it was so I looked and told her that it was 8:28. She asked if we could wait two minutes to rinse her hair because it hadn't been exactly 30 minutes since she had the medicine and she couldn't lay back yet. I'm not sure if she thought she'd explode or something if she didn't obey the directions, but she was quite adamant that we wait until exactly 8:30 so she could lay back in the water without worry. I told her that it was quite alright if we rinsed her hair and nothing bad would happen, but she looked up at me with the most horrified look on her face. She looked as if I had suggested she run naked through the neighborhood or something similarly mortifying.
She may look exactly like Craig and have his knack for numbers, but she sure is my kid.
Poor thing.

I had such high hopes for her.

It looks like the neurotic gene doesn't skip a generation.