PERSONAL TOUCHES ADD TO THE EXPERIENCE

Growing up, I learned from my father to always put a personal touch on whatever you are doing.

If it was playing a board game, he would add rules to spice things up. It was a shock to learn that, when playing Monopoly, it is not actually a universal rule that landing exactly on "Go" meant you get $500 instead of the normal $200 for passing go.

If it was making foods - breakfast is his specialty - he added ingredients. It was unusual not to find something mixed in with our pancakes when he made them. My favorite were the chocolate chip pancakes. Hey, chocolate makes everything better.

So maybe I learned my penchant for trying to add personal touch to a recipe from Dad. 

I took banana bread duty.

Over the weekend, we had a Halloween/Retirement party to attend, as The Wife mentioned yesterday. Besides taking care of the Little One, we had two major tasks to complete:

1. Make our costumes, which involved painting the words "The" on one t-shirt and "Middle" on another.

2. Make a loaf of banana bread to bring to the party.

If you spotted me a ruler, pen and a flat service, I would have trouble drawing a straight line. Painting letters on a shirt was not a great task for me.

So I chose the banana bread. Never made it before, but I'm decent in the kitchen, and The Wife said it wouldn't be too tough. With this recipe from www.grouprecipes.com as a guide, I went to work.

We decided it would be fun to try and cut slices of the bread into little tombstones. Keeping the Halloween them in mind, I added between 1/8 and 1/4 cup of baking cocoa to the mix. This added a dark brown color to the bread for the creepy Halloween look. Plus, as I mentioned already, chocolate makes everything better.

My other personal touch was adding 1/3 cup of apple cider to the mix. In my mind, this added a seasonal flavor to the bread. My instinct on the flavor was right… the bread tasted great.

However, adding the cider meant adding moisture, which made the bread tougher to cut into tombstone-shaped pieces. Appearance-wise, my tombstones were only okay.

As often happens, The Wife came to the rescue. Using some white frosting, she was able to write "R.I.P." and add other decorations to the bread. 

Just another touch to give our culinary contribution to the party a little bit of a personal touch.

Tombstone Bread.