In Which There is Failure, then Banana and Chocolate

Yesterday, I was really hoping to get a song recorded, but my recording software was driving me crazy.  I use Audacity, which has the advantage of being very user-friendly and available as a free, legal download.  It has the disadvantage of sucking.

That isn't really fair to say; it's perfectly adequate in a lot of ways, but if you want to record one track over another--say you're trying to add harmonies or something--you soon realize that Audacity records at a slightly faster speed than playback, meaning that inevitably, after a few seconds, the tracks won't sync up.  The only way to fight this that I know of is to add any additional tracks in tiny, 10-second intervals before the phenomenon becomes apparent.  However, this takes forever, and it can still sound off.

So until the day some engineering angel descends from the heavens to sounds of perfectly mixed trumpets and fixes Audacity--or until I just pony up and ask my boyfriend for help--here instead is a recipe for orange-chocolate banana bread.


Aw yeah, technical incompetence has never tasted so delicious.

Just after my freshman year of high school, we moved to a new state.  In an unfamiliar land and with no friends to speak of, I handled my feelings of isolation the way so many fifteen-year-olds do: by obsessively baking banana bread.  Cooking Light had recently put out an article featuring seven variations on the classic quickbread, and I powered my way through all of them in our temporary apartment kitchen.

The best version, in my mind, was always the marbled chocolate.  However, it calls for eggs and yogurt, so when I moved into the co-op, I knew I'd have to find a cheaper, more vegan-friendly version.  The solution was simple: take the perfectly delicious orange banana bread recipe (which uses OJ rather than yogurt to activate the baking soda) and adapt it to my needs.  Since most of the moisture of banana bread comes from mashed bananas anyway, it veganizes pretty well.  Eggs become egg substitute, and butter becomes margarine, with no loss to flavor or texture.

From there, all you need to do is follow the chocolate marbling instructions from the other recipe, bake it at 350 until a toothpick comes out clean, and serve it warm with peanut butter.