Banana Upside Down Cake

OK, tell me you don't want it: a dense, buttery cake with bananas sitting in caramel.

Well, OK, maybe you don't. If September is truly the start of the new year, you might have a resolution or two up your sleeve. I want to bone up on my French. I've lost it since we moved to the country four years ago. I don't get into too many conversations about the proper use of the subjunctive with my neighbors.

But I digress. I'm supposed to be writing about banana upside down cake. How it got mixed up with the subjunctive is. . . .

Right. Resolutions. The best thing about calling September the new year is that you don't have to make any. No French, no gym memberships. Those are all well and good. But you don't have to. You can just celebrate this thing called time. (Or not. At fifty, I can't decide which.)

I warn you, real food lovers: this cake is a also a celebration of butter. Without a doubt, it's empty calories. Probably eight servings in this thing. But butter is a real fat. Better that than some fake stuff. And yes, there's sugar involved. Even corn syrup. We'll get to that. On to the cake:

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Baguettes, Part Two

On we go from last time. (For that, click here.)

The dough has been set aside in that clichéd "warm, draft-free place." And it's doubled in bulk over about an hour. In other words, there's about twice of it, compared to when it started, thanks to the yeast eating too much. About like me.

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Baguettes, Part One

When Bruce and I met, I was the baker in the family. It stemmed from an awful failure in graduate school: orange breakfast rolls. I was taking an advanced seminar in medieval chivalric romance, it met at 8:00 am, and we grad students agreed to take turns bringing in breakfast to help us get through three hours of Petrarchan references. Also? The professor was a strict, emaciated, no-nonsense type who'd spent her entire adult life crawling around convents in Europe to find a source for one half of Chaucer's Second Nun's Tale. In other words, she wasn't exactly a laugh a minute.

On the week I was up for breakfast, I decided to make this orange breakfast roll recipe I'd found in some cooking magazine--sort of like cinnamon rolls but with candied orange peel and a pinch of ground cardamom sprinkled on the dough before it was rolled up.

I was up until four in the morning trying to get the stuff to rise.

Out of that misfortune came a determination to make yeast work. (Maybe I'd taken in some of that grim single-mindedness from my convent-crawling professor.)

Over the ensuing years, I baked a lot of bread. Before I met Bruce and even after. Because he was at first the typical chef-school type: I cook; I don't bake. (Make sure you say it with a slight sneer.) Except he watched me a few times--and got totally into it. His downfall from the heights of proper cheffery? Making a decent pie crust. But that's another story entirely.

Today he's quite the baker. He whips up fresh bread for dinner--just because.

So on to these simple, homey baguettes we had with soup the other night. I realize I've delayed too long with this story. But consider it proper training for bread-making: lots of patience.

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