Practice, practice, practice....

  Look what happens when you get help from a pro! This weekend my very talented friend and co worker gave me a cookie decorating lesson. She was full of great advice and information. Plus I learned how to make polka dots, hearts and flowers using the wet on wet icing technique! So the coolest thing about using royal icing (in my humble opinion) is it allows you to make multicolor designs that blend into each other to make one smooth surface. As you can see, I am now a huge fan of polka dots!!
  In other news...  I have had the whole weekend off. So that means lots of baking time. I made two loaves of bread, decorated cookies. I plan to make apple crisp later on today. And I made chocolate chip banana bread this morning.
  I talked to my mother this morning. I mentioned I was making chocolate chip banana bread. She was appalled. She said adding chocolate chips to banana bread was a bastardization. Well frankly, I don't care because it is super yummy!! And as you can probably tell, I love chocolate. And I am willing to add chocolate to any baked good. I mean come on...It's good stuff!
  Here is the recipe. This began as a Joy the Baker recipe before I made several adjustments. It's a sickness, but I have a difficult time not changing recipes to make them my own. But thanks Joy the Baker, you know what you are doing!!

The Ingredients:

4 very ripe bananas
1/2 cup melted unsalted butter
2 eggs
1 and 1/2  tsp vanilla
1 and 3/4 cup AP flour
3/4 cup sugar
1/4 baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon
1 cup chocolate chips

Directions:

preheat oven to 350F

In a large bowl mash bananas.  Add the melted and cooled butter, the eggs and the vanilla. Mix together these until everything is incorporated. Add flour, baking soda, sugar, salt and cinnamon. Mix together until just incorporated. At this point, fold in chocolate chips. Spoon mixture into a prepared loaf pan. Bake at 350F for 55-60 minutes. Make sure to do the toothpick test. If the toothpick comes out clean you are good to go!

Let the bread cool in the loaf pan for a bit before turning it out.

This is a dense, yummilicious bread. Great for breakfasts in a hurry. Or really, great for any old time!!