Dear, Past Lauren (How to Bake Banana Bread)

Step 1: Buy way more bananas than you and Marcus will ever eat. When bananas start to go bad, freeze them and then forget about them and buy more bananas. Tell yourself that you will make smoothies because smoothies are healthy and you want to be healthy. Remember that you can't be bothered to clean anything ever, especially the blender, because you will never be a real adult. Give up on smoothies.

This is what happened when I Google searched "so many bananas". Via

Step 2: (Probably several weeks/months later) find a huge bag of frozen bananas in the fridge. Decide to make banana bread. Look up recipes. Get out a mixing bowl and all of the dry ingredients. When you go to measure out dry ingredients, you will realize that you don't have a measuring cup or measuring spoons. Instead of stopping to think about what you are doing, you will decide that this makes things more fun. Guesstimating is a valid form of measurement*, so go ahead and throw together those dry ingredients. At this point, you will realize that you don't have any of the wet ingredients except for a bunch of frozen bananas. Hide the bowl of dry ingredients in the top of the cupboard so that Marcus won't notice what you've done.

I know the frozen bananas look like a bag of slugs, but I really wanted 

to illustrate a future point and it seemed wrong to include only one visual. 

Step 3: (Several weeks after Step 2) you will randomly crave banana bread and, having accumulated even more old, frozen bananas, this will seem like the perfect time. Now, you will have eggs and milk, but the recipe will call for butter. Make the first substitution that comes to mind, which will be something like vegetable oil and water, because you remember someone telling you once that EVOO is not for baking. Grab that bowl of dry ingredients out of the cupboard and assume that nothing weird has happened to it.

Continue to guesstimate. Make sure to include a preposterous amount of cinnamon and nutmeg that the recipe did not call for. Add way more bananas than the recipe calls for and don't bother to thaw them first. You will realize that this was stupid and that you are too impatient to wait for anything to thaw. Repeatedly stab the bananas with a fork and then when you can't stir anything, use your hands to stir, which will turn them into ice cubes. Take this as a sign that you should remove your hands and taste test everything, because if the batter tastes good, the bread has to taste good.

I imagine that bananas do not like to be stabbed. 

Step 4: Pour your banana bread into some greased pans. Even though it says to bake for an hour, check your bread every five minutes by stabbing it with a sharp object to see if it comes out clean. When it does, pull bread out of oven. Do not wait for it to cool.

Whoever thought that the "food" editing option on Marcus's iPhone camera app. would come in so handy?

Step 5: Decide your banana bread is awesome. Get friends who don't bake to help you eat everything before anyone else can taste it and ask for the recipe.

Final step: Regret not taking pictures of the process. Decide to illustrate. Remember that you are the worst MS Paint user in the history of MS Paint users. Do it anyway. Apologize profusely.

Also, if you're curious, this is the recipe that I butchered.

*I work in a chemistry lab, where guesstimating is generally frowned upon.