Nobody Knows Anything

Welcome to Diane Patterson's eclectic blog about what strikes her fancy

Chocolate Banana Chocolate Chip Bread

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I had a whole bunch of bananas slowly going black in my kitchen, and I said to myself, “Self, what should we do with all these bananas?” I whipped open How To Be A Domestic Goddess and thought Nigella’s recipe for Banana Bread sounded good, except it had raisins—golden raisins, to be exact; sultanas, if you’re on the other side of the Pond—and I’m not terribly fond of raisins in my food. Then I noticed at the bottom that she had a note about making a version of this for some of her friends, substituting cocoa for some of the flour and adding chocolate chips.

Well, okay, Nigella, if you insist:

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1 cup plain flour

2 tablespoons cocoa powder

2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

125g unsalted butter, melted

150g sugar

2 large eggs

4 small, very ripe bananas (about 300g weighed without skins), mashed

4 ounces chocolate chips

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 325ºF. Put the flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, baking soda and salt in a medium-sized bowl and combine well — stirring with a wooden spoon worked just fine for me. Once the dry ingredients are combined, then stir in the chocolate chips and get them coated.

Mash the bananas in a second bowl — you could go all out and use a food processor to reduce them to a liquid or cream, but I used a potato masher and ended up with some lumps of banana in the mixture, which turned out great.

In a large bowl, mix the melted butter and sugar and beat until blended. Beat the eggs into the butter/sugar mixture one at a time, then the mashed bananas. Then, with your wooden spoon, stir in the vanilla extract. Add the flour mixture, a third at a time, stirring well after each bit.

Scrape into the loaf pan and bake in the middle of the oven for 1 to 1 and a quarter hours. (I made two loaves at once, and the hour and 15 minutes worked perfectly.) When it’s done, an inserted toothpick or fine skewer should come out cleanish — surprisingly, even though I’d used chocolate chips, no chocolate came out on the toothpick. Leave in the pan on a rack to cool.

This was delicious — very banana, very chocolate, not gooey. The chocolate chips were even distributed through the cake, which was great. I will definitely make this one again—it took approximately ten minutes to throw together, and then all I had to do was wait for it to bake. In fact, I left it in the pan to cool overnight, so it made an excellent breakfast treat in the morning.

I made two loaves (lots of bananas), so Darin took one to work. One of his team members yelled, “Cake!” and within seconds the entire loaf was gone.

I might try a little extra cocoa powder next time, for a much more chocolate taste to the bread, or maybe I’ll get some black cocoa from King Arthur and try that out.

American vs. British smiles

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The whole thing goes beyond the various stages of dental care, evidently.

An article in the Times of London says that you can tell an American from a Brit by the smile:

While we British smile by pulling our lips back and upwards and exposing our lower teeth, Americans are more likely simply to part their lips and stretch the corners of their mouths.

So distinct is the difference that the scientist behind the research was able last week to pick out Britons from Americans from close-cropped pictures of their smiles alone, with an accuracy of more than 90%.

The study by Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at the University of California in Berkeley, near San Francisco, analysed the 43 facial muscles used by humans to charm, smirk and appease.

He found the British were also more likely to raise their cheeks when they smile, showing the crow’s feet at the corners of the eyes. This produces a more sincere, hard-to-fake smile.

The most common British smile—restrained but dignified—is called the Duchenne smile after Guillaume Duchenne, a 19th century French doctor who analysed facial expressions.

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By contrast, Keltner found most Americans had the far less expressive “Pan-Am smile”, named after the defunct airline’s gesture of welcome. This depends only on the zygomaticus major corner-tightening muscle and has also been called the “Botox smile” because, like the cosmetic treatment, it leaves the muscles at the corners of the eyes motionless.

I was somewhat frustrated by this story because there were no pictures. (Well, maybe there were with the online edition, instead of the print edition, but you have to register for the online edition.) There’s a bit with analysis of various UK celebrities—”Tim Henman’s grin showed he was ‘genuine, coy and flirtatious’, he said, while David Beckham’s smile and jutting chin indicated he was ‘determined to win at any cost’. The smirking grin of Chris Tarrant, host of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, suggested a man who ‘felt he was getting away with something'”—that I would love to have compared with actual pictures. Alas. Guess I’ll have to pick up the book.

I’ve heard the bit that you can tell a genuine smile by various factors—such as the skin around the eyes forming crows’ feet before. You have to look at the eyes. I remember walking around San Francisco when David Letterman was coming to town and there were all these giant posters of Dave smiling from various kiosks. “Look at his eyes! That man is terrified!” I said. Not a smiler, that David Letterman.