red wine chocolate cake.

I recently bought this wine - it's called Sweet Red and total college budget level (Carlo Rossi anyone?). Wine is definitely growing on me, especially red. I mean no big deal that I can't pair it with food or make any knowledgable comment about it whatsoever, but I'm slowly learning!

So this Sweet Red. I tried it, and was like, yeah it's totally sweet! Then I looked at the label and was like oh yeah. It's totally less than 10% alcohol. So it's sort of like juice. Right?

Ha ha. Kidding. But that's more sugar than I would want in an occasional drink with dinner. So I decided that it must be put into cake. It made perfect sense to me. And apparently to Deb from Smitten Kitchen, too, because that's where I found the recipe for this delicious cake.

caramelized banana bread + browned butter glaze.

Have you heard of bananas foster? Butter and sugar are roasted in a pan, then sliced bananas are added until they start to soften. At the very end, some rum is sploshed in, before the whole mixture is spooned over ice cream while still warm.

The same concept is applied to this (relatively healthy) banana bread. The bananas are roasted with butter and sugar until they caramelize a little, and then the mixture is mashed together until everything is homogenous.

That sweet sticky mixture is incorporated into the rest of the ingredients, and baked in a loaf pan till golden. Afterwards, a thick glaze is spooned over the entire loaf, so that it dribbles into every crevice.