It’s not a cake but it is dessert that you can have for breakfast!

It’s not a cake but it is dessert that you can have for breakfast!

I made some banana bread while home with a sick kiddo today. We have a habit of buying bananas and 70% of the time we eat them all within a couple days of purchase, but the other 30% of the time they’ve turned brown and I need to find a good way to use them so they don’t go to waste (if all else fails our dogs love a squishy banana).

So, I’ve been planning to find

1. A go-to banana bread recipe
2. A go-to smoothie recipe that calls for a banana

Well, this morning at 9:07AM on a Monday morning I was home with a sick kid, 2 brown bananas and 4 yellow ones when this recipe arrived in my inbox.

So, figured now was as good a time as any to act on my plan.

Here’s the deets on the delicious banana bread

I can confirm that it was both quick and delicious.

Ingredients

• 3 Medium Bananas mashed
• 1/2 cup mayonnaise or dressing
• 1 egg
• 1 1/2 cups flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 1/2 cup chopped pecans

I’m not going to lie. Seeing “Mayo” threw me for a loop and I had to do some light google research on mayonnaise in cooked breads before I moved forward, but I’m glad I did because this bread was also easy as the recipe title aludes to.

Speaking of recipe:

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 350

2. In a bowl mix together mashed bananas, mayo and egg. In a separate bowl combine flour, sugar, baking soda, salt and pecans

3. Add flour mixture to wet mixture and stir just until combined. Note: The mixture will be very thick, do not over mix

4. Pour into a greased loaf pan. Bake 60-70 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.

Ta-da! I only baked mine for 62 minutes and it was golden brown, cooked through, and delectable. I didn’t have nuts at home but we did have chocolate chips so, of course, I added those in. I like recipes that don’t require many out of the ordinary ingredients and ones where I can leave out what I don’t have and the end product is still scrumptious.

Now, to find a smoothie recipe… or perhaps the universe (or Spend With Pennies) will send one of those my way, too.

Let them eat cake!

On my first son’s 1st birthday, I decided to start the tradition of making fun (hopefully delicious) homemade birthday cakes. I’ve been hearing this distant call towards homemaking, something I’ve never been naturally drawn to but now am finally getting a slight interest in, and decided making homemade birthday cakes and inviting the grandparents and great grandmas over to start an at-home birthday tradition was a great way to get my feet wet.

Now, full disclosure, I only have a hand mixer and vowed not to upgrade to any fancy kitchen appliances unnecessarily or prematurely. Therefore, when I say homemade, for me, at least for the foreseeable future, that likely still includes a boxed mix base and probably store bought icing too.

However, I’ve also found that there is still a lot of room for fun and creativity even if my homemade isn’t a Martha Stewart make-from-scratch caliber… yet (or ever).

So without further ado, here was my first homemade birthday cake for my first son’s 1st birthday:

I think this one, especially since it was a first attempt, turned out pretty well.

I used yellow cake with chocolate icing, raisinets for the campfire rocks and cake border, toothpicks with marshmallows for the “s’more-making” over the campfire, and birthday candles for the campfire flames. I cut up part of an old gift bag that had a red and black pattern and used toothpicks to make the camping tent. Now, I did go to a craft store to purchase the trees from the model-building section and the glittery #1 from the cake baking section. Neither were expensive and it was fun to use examples on Pinterest to decide how I wanted mine to look and then buy a few inexpensive essentials to pull the look together.

Since that inaugural birthday cake I’ve made various others with varying success. However, my bar for success is mostly: did people eat it? Yes! Great!

For my husband’s summer birthday, I tried a homemade ice cream cake borrowing from Ree Drummond, the Pioneer Woman:

Then there was a series of Dino cakes, including one for my first son’s 2nd birthday and my husband’s summer birthday a few months later as my first son has been into Dinos:

When it came time for my second son’s 1st birthday, I wanted to steer clear of the Dino theme, so I went with another current favorite– “working trucks”:

Again, the base is box chocolate cake mix and store-bought chocolate icing. Then I put a bunch of Oreos in a ziplock bag, first taking out the white icing center, and then hit them with the rolling pin until they were crushed up. I staged them at the bottom of the cake, on top and then tumbling down the side. The “working trucks” I purchased inexpensively off Amazon and my kids still enjoy playing with them.

Most recently, for my mom’s birthday this winter I wanted make something that she would really enjoy— that I could manage. And, for her, I knew that would include lots of chocolate and raspberry and less dinos and working trucks.

So, I decided on this chocolate raspberry layer cake from Giada since when I read the recipe it sounded like the perfect mix of homemade with a store-bought base for me. In all honesty, though, I modified it even more– which I’ll detail more later, but here’s my final product:

We’ve even started making cakes for other “holidays” besides birthdays (I used quotes here because jury is still out if Valentine’s Day is a holiday or not). Also TDB if we’re making too many cakes– or it it’s even possible to make too many cakes:

I’ll continue to chronicle my cakescapades here as long as I continue to enjoy it.