Great New Taste: 100% more Butter

While most people aspire to make healthier baked goods, I have a tendency to inadvertently make perfectly unhealthy delicious baked goods even unhealthier. Last night I christened my new bundt pan purchased with my ill-gotten NCAA March Madness winnings. I made my favorite Best Ever Banana Bread from my FamilyFun Cookbook since I had some frozen over ripened bananas Adam had given me last week for this exact purpose. I was super excited about my new bundt pan because the banana bread looked great on my cake stand.

It was a beautiful morning and I was feeling pretty groovy walking to work when I had an epiphany; I had doubled the amount of butter in the banana bread as the recipe called for. Unfortunately this isn't the first time I've inadvertently doubled the butter in a perfectly fatty recipe. Last Christmas, I made Greg, my boss, a Chocolate Pecan Pie. The following is a reconstructed conversation:

Greg: Thanks for the Chocolate Pecan Pie. It looks great; I'm excited to try it.
Ann: You're welcome, It's really easy to make and it's not that bad for you, only 1/4 cup of butter in the filling...that's only one stick.
Greg: Uhhh, isn't 1/4 cup half a stick because a whole stick is 1/2 cup.
Ann: Yikes...you're right. No wonder the filling wasn't setting last night and it seemed abnormally gooey.

It was super buttery chocolate pecan pie. That weekend, Greg and his wife Helen ate the entire pie with ice cream to boot and the butter levels had been fully disclosed to them. Now that's impressive in my book. I had a bite of the super buttery banana bread this morning and it's super rich. I think I'll have to throw in some sort of health cautionary warning about the banana bread for my roommates. "Warning: This banana bread may cause obesity and heart attacks. Please reduce intake by approximately 50% to compensate for the extra butter I used."

My mind has some sort of short circuit when it comes to butter measurements. I get confused with cups and pounds. I think 1/2 cup is 1/2 pound and I end up using 1 whole cup instead. Jess, helpfully, pointed out that recipes almost always measure butter in cups, not pounds. That's really comforting, not only are fractions problematic for me, I can't read as well.

The other problem is I never make a mental connection between what I observe and what's causing the problem. For instance, I'll think, "Hmmm, this filling is rather gooey and isn't really setting," or "I wonder why there's all this extra butter on the bottom of the bowl, I better scrape and incorporate it into the batter," or "Gee golly this batter looks different from what I remember," but I won't realize that I've used too much butter until after the fact. In retrospect, there were red flags flying up all over the place and it all makes sense. Sometimes, I really wish I didn't do blog-worthy things like this.

Today's Life Lesson: I suppose there are worse things in life like using salt instead of sugar and cancer.