almond flour banana bread.

Spent an hour on the phone with Yahoo! tech support tonight, they're doing this awesome thing where they don't tell you exactly how long your hold time is going to be, but that it's going to be "more than 30 minutes". But then that's the last you hear from them. No "you are number [computer voice] 14 in the queue", no nothing.

In case you don't have the nebulous "more than a half an hour" to sit around and listen to old Dave Koz CDs on hold, you can opt to have them call you. Awesome, right? Except they can't tell you exactly how long that will take either, their best guess tonight was "366 minutes". They couldn't come to the phone right now, but they would call me back in "366 minutes". I decided to wait an hour on hold with the Koz instead.

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You may not know that Mara is a bit of a gadget person. True fact. I attribute this to persistent flashes of unvanquishable young-at-heart optimism and a related continuing hope for feelings of childlike wonderment. Plus a bitch just like new toys.

A few months ago she bought this "mini cupcake maker" for €7 at the drugstore. As always, we are a bit skeptical as to how well these bargain devices will function once they're home, but this one seems like a weener so far. Our poor cancer-ridden neighbor was having some more of herself removed this week and while we were feeding her cat yesterday we noticed a bunch of bananas symbolically going brown on the counter.

We knew this was somewhere we could make a real difference, and immediately decided to turn this particular story of decomposing organic matter into a happy ending we could taste: we stole her damn bananas* and made this gluten-free bread that became cupcake muffins. Totally great, didn't taste one bit healthy.

* OK, she came home today and yes, we gave her some of the cupcakes.

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almond flour banana bread.

1 1/2 cups almond meal or almond flour
4 rather small eggs, beaten
1/3 cup shredded unsweetened coconut
1/4 cup butter
3/4 cup brown sugar
3 medium bananas, mashed (about 1 cup banana puree)
1 tsp vanilla extract
3/4 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp nutmeg
3/4 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt

Cream butter and sugar together, stir in eggs. Add mashed bananas, vanilla, cinnamon and nutmeg. In a separate bowl, combine almond flour, coconut, baking powder and salt. Stir into banana mixture just until combined. 350F for about 20 minutes for standard size muffins or according to your budget drugstore cupcake muffin maker's instructions.




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