Don’t judge my banana bread bites by their beauty!

Friday, Friday, gotta get down on Friday! Okay, that’s all I’ll allow myself.

This weekend has TWO super exciting events! The first is a 6-hour “distance classic” I somehow ended up signing up for. It’s a mile loop around Crissy Field put on by Dolphin South End Runners (a running club in SF) and you run as many as you can or want. It’s really cheap and at each mile there’s an “aid station” with water, sports drink, and snacks. AND a bathroom. AND ten bloggers I just met are going! #win. I’m going to try to run 18 miles.

Aaaand, the second, equally exciting, also involving a bunch of potential new friends, is #Fitbloggin Local!

I’m really looking forward to meeting a bunch of Bay Area bloggers. Making new friends is one of the most exciting things about moving to a new city–especially new friends with common interests. I can’t wait.

I decided to bake something. Despite that I love cooking and baking, today was only the second time I’ve used my oven since I’ve moved in.

WTF?

**silly story begins here**

Let me explain. A couple weeks after I moved into my hobbit hole, I decided to cook a nice dinner. For me… and a dude I was seeing. I spent $30+ on ingredients, came home, prepared a veggie/rice dish, and marinated salmon which I was going to bake. I preheat the oven--which has no light to indicate if it’s on or off, weird–and then stick the salmon in, expecting it to be about twenty minutes.Three minutes later I open the oven door, just to make sure that the fish is cooking.

The smoke monster from LOST flies out of the oven into my face. Then it dissipates, rapidly filling my very small partly-underground apartment with a dark haze, setting the smoke alarm wailing. I can’t turn it off, so I end up literally ripping the alarm out of the wall. I’m coughing and can barely see in my apartment, and my windows only open a few inches. Now I have two raw pieces of salmon on some charred wax paper. (There was crumbs etc. in the bottom of the oven that must have set on fire.)

Being resourceful, I end up cooking the fish in the microwave (yes, the microwave) while doing my absolute best to air out my complete fire hazard of an apartment. With little success. My guest gets there, I’m sweating, heart still racing from almost burning down my building, and all I want to do is open a bottle of wine. But I don’t have a bottle opener! We try a knife. And then we try to just push it INTO the bottle. Nothing works. So we ate microwaved salmon, paired with water. Shockingly, it was actually quite good, and I got a funny story out of it.

**silly story over!**

But basically, I’ve been scared to use my oven ever since. I use the stovetop every day, but didn’t want to set another fire. But I realized it was time. I had some very, very brown bananas that called for banana bread muffins. And I hda a mini muffin pan begging to be used. Enter banana bread mini muffins!

Banana Bread Bites with Nutella Topping (aka Banana Bread Mini-Muffins)

I made adapted nutella banana bread while living in my hut in Africa (blog post here) and wanted to replicate something similar in mini-muffin form. I based my recipe off of this one for Nutella Swirled Banana Bread from RecipeGirl.

Ingredients assembled.

Orange bowl: four so-ripe-they-were-soggy bananas, 1/2 cup of plain yogurt, and a bunch of vanilla extract, plus a tiny bit of cinnamon. Blue blow: one half stick of butter plus one cup sugar. Yellow bowl: 2 cups flower, 1/2t of salt, 1t of baking powder, plus 1/2t of baking soda. I tend to never know which one of those two to use so I often use both. Awesome.

Then I mixed them all together, with two eggs beat into the egg and sugar mixture.

Separated some of the batter and stirred in about 1/3 jar of Nutella. (I ate the first 2/3 of the jar while watching Sex and the City and dipping popcorn and/or my finger into the jar. Don’t worry, it wasn’t on one night. It was over, like, two nights.)

I busted out the “Made in USA!” Sur La Table mini muffin/cupcake tin that my daddy got me. I put 1T of batter in each one topped by about 1/2T of nutella batter. I thought they were cute and spotted when they went into the oven. Oh, and I realized why the fire happened. There’s a little oven gauge inside my oven, and when it was set to 350, it was actually 525!  This would explain the fire because if it was set to 400 on the dial it was probably pushing 600 degrees in there. Oops.

LOOK HOW HIDEOUS THESE CAME OUT!!! I needed to swirl the batter around first. They had slightly different textures so they didn’t mix. #fail

They were still totally delicious though. SO good. Like banana bread cupcakes almost. Really light and fluffy. I hope my #fitbloggin friends still eat them. Because they aren’t pretty. Oh well… worst thing that happens is more for me!

I highly recommend this recipe though. Just swirl the batters better and they will be pretty. They are SO good.

Happy Friday, everybody!

Made anything lately that came out ugly? What do you eat that you’d never want to take a picture of? Any fun plans for the weekend?

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• Long Run Day and Weekend Baking: My First Pizzert