Sylvia's Scenario

Now that Father's Day is over and our visitors have left,  I've had some time to settle down.   I thought I would post my other cream pie that I made for Father's Day this year which was a banana cream pie to accompany the chocolate cream pie.  I have only a few days left until our very busy July hits with five birthdays to celebrate, plus our anniversary, plus the fourth of July.  So, it will be a busy July.  I've made this banana cream pie several times so I am finally posting it.  In my family, chocolate cream pie is the favorite but honestly, this recipe is a close second.  I usually make them together for a big crowd which I did this year for  Father's Day because there were ten of us with my sister and her husband visiting and my brother and his wife also visiting.  There are never any complaints about having too much pie.   After everyone left, I took a week off and went on an Alaska cruise with a girlfriend which was a ukulele c...

This is sort of a random recipe that I wasn't planning to post but my family all loved it so much that I knew it was a keeper.  I got the recipe from  Sally's Baking Addiction  at the spur of the moment when my 4-year-old grandson decided at the last minute he wanted a banana cake for his birthday. The only difference between my recipe and the original recipe is that I made my cake into a layered cake instead of putting it in a 9” X 13" pan...you know, to get that traditional birthday cake look and to get that birthday cake look that's decorated by a 6-year-old and 4-year-old. I also made  Beatty's Chocolate Cake  for Lauren, the same cake I made to celebrate all five of the July birthdays last year.    This year, we all got individual celebrations and cakes.  How lucky is that?                                      You can safely say that we all got...

I've always loved the banana/chocolate combination.  Remember my  chocolate swirl banana bread ?  It's one of my favorites.  Now I have a cookie version!  I made these last night while Bruce was catching up on the Masters Golf Tournament that he recorded.  This is Masters weekend, you know. S ince we live in Seattle now, we're getting together at Barbara and Jim's house instead of them driving to Boise and spending 4 days watching it at our house for our usual  Master's Weekend .  Living near each other is a lot easier.  Since we all four went to the Master's together in 2010, we feel the need to be together on this special weekend.  Now, we live only 20 minutes away.  So nice.  We can each stay in the comforts of our own home so I have lots of extra time this Master's weekend.  I had one over-ripe banana left in the fruit bowl, which is often the case.  After moving, I decided I'm not freezing bananas anymore...

Just like my pie crust recipe and my pancake recipe, I have tried so many banana bread recipes, too many to count.  But now I've finally found one that I'm keeping.  It's a combination of a couple different recipes I've tried over the years, the main part being from The America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook which I base a lot of my recipes on.  If they are testing all their recipes to perfection, which they do in that cookbook, then why am I still changing the recipes?  I don't know, but I do.  It's in my genes, I think… You can make this recipe without the chocolate swirl, just omit that part of the recipe.  But I love it, as does every single female I've shared this banana bread with.  I took a loaf to work this week for our monthly staff meeting and the whole loaf was gone by the end of the day…Dietitian's know good food when they taste it.  Sorry, Nick.  I would have sent you a loaf but both loaves ended up disappearing before I c...