Three Steps to Heaven

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I don’t know when exactly the spike in baking content registered for me, but one day I woke up and everyone was talking about sourdough bread. I don’t like sourdough bread. My impression of it is that it is chewy and expensive. I once visited a friend’s house, back in the days before house visitations were considered controversial events, when I was much younger and much less polite. I said: “What is that horrible sewage smell.” 

She said: “That is my sourdough starter and you will regret saying that once it turns into amazing bread.” 

I replied: “Good luck getting me to put that into my mouth.” And that was the end of my sourdough journey. 

But suddenly, the whole world was into sourdough bread. I didn’t mind. I thought that it would just be yet another pandemic trend I could ignore. I had already ignored the home fitness trend, the Dalgona coffee trend, and the TikTok trend. But it was getting increasingly hard to ignore the bad behavior trend. Perhaps I trivialize it by referring to it as a trend, but if so, it is only to diminish the severity of my own part in it. I was tired all the time, and didn’t want to interrogate my own change in moods, or what it meant in the long run. It was easy to pretend that my short-temperedness was a temporal glitch rather than an assimilated state of being. What’s more, my newfound grouchiness was not unique. Just a few weeks ago, a girlfriend texted me to express her deep and uncharacteristic hatred of a mutual acquaintance who had lost ten pounds via a strict exercise routine this lockdown, while the rest of us inhaled pasta. I replied: Amen, sister. 

I ignored everything up till the point where I opened Twitter one morning to a rant on food bloggers. My thumb HURTS from SCROLLING, a Twitter user said, I just want a recipe, not your ENTIRE FAMILY HISTORY. Someone else chimed in under that: Imagine being so un-self-aware that you think people actually care about what you have to say about the time your stupid boyfriend proposed under a pear tree. Yet another: People don’t even have enough to make rent, and basic bitches be here using up all the flour in Trader Joes for Instagram likes. The tweets were piling and vicious. I generally welcomed anger as a productive emotion, but this felt a step too far; it was unbridled in a way that scared me, especially in the familiarity of its resonance. Immediately, I felt shame, as if I had said those things myself. I wanted to put as much distance between myself and this behavior as possible, but no, disavowing it was not enough, I wanted to become the antithesis of this biting acrimony. 

I still do not like sourdough bread. I cannot articulate its vowels without its imagined whiff turning my stomach. But I cannot think of a single person for whom banana cake does not stir fond and fragrant memories, of giving and receiving, of baking and eating. Of a dense loaf, still warm in the hand. For me, my mother’s homemade banana cake, adapted from an old Pinterest recipe, is heaven. And dear reader, you have already scrolled this far. 

Some Excellent Homemade Banana Cake: 

Prep: 10 minutes

Cooking time: 1 hour

Serves: 15 respectable people

Or: 1 quarantined woman 

Ingredients:

• Half cup butter, melted

• Half cup white sugar

• Two large eggs

• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

• 1.5 cups all-purpose flour

• 1 teaspoon baking soda

• Half teaspoon salt

• Half cup sour cream

• A pinch of sugar

• One cup chopped walnuts

• Quarter cup baking chips (preferred: Hershey’s semi-sweet baking chocolate chips)

• 4-5 medium, sliced Pisang Rajah or Pisang Perangan bananas, if unable to obtain either variety, then ensure that the bananas on hand are at least very ripe. 

Step One: 

Preheat oven to 175 degrees Celcius (350 degrees F) 

Step Two:

Stir in this order: butter + sugar; eggs + vanilla; flour + baking soda + salt. Mix until smooth. Fold in sour cream, walnuts, bananas. Spread evenly into greased loaf pan. Sprinkle a bit of sugar on top for crispiness. 

Step Three:

Bake for 60 minutes. Cool for 10 minutes.  

Best had with:

• One cup of black coffee or cold milk, depending on lactose tolerance

• A thick dollop of cream cheese, despite varying levels of lactose tolerance

• An excellent rainy day playlist, with the music turned down low.