Bananchies

Reunion post-mortem:

Every Rhodes party comes complete with drunk speeches… old ballie stands up to welcome all the guests with a cheerful “leddies n genllmn… our edution sstem…” complete with the interesting toast of “to old faces, and new colour”.

Aaaah… the Eastern Cape is finally catching on to the idea of the Rainbow Nation.

The speech that followed started with “you haven’t come here to listen to me speak…” and went on 45minutes too long. The third speech was short and to the point: Let’s get drunk and vomit.

We were also reminded to please keep off the bowling green, as Rhodes is running out of venues to host Alumni functions. We can never go back to the same place the next year. You can take the Rhodent out of the Eastern Cape, but you can’t take the... urgh, it’s not gonna work, but you get what I mean.

I won a brilliantly purple Rhodes cap in the raffle draw. I wasn’t there to collect my prize, so Chlu claimed it for me – and then wouldn’t let me wear it. I never win anything, when I do, it’s hideous and withheld from me anyway.

I got over it, by ploughing through as many savannahs as I could get my grubby paws on. A direct consequence of this was me marching up to Mr DM and demanding a dance-off, for old times sake. I literally stomped my foot for emphasis.

The dance-off itself, in my humble opinion, was the dance-off to end all dance-offs. Mr DM and I have been known to attempt break-dancing in our footloose competitions in the past.

This time, we managed to amass a circle of cheering, clapping spectators as we went dance move for dance move on the newly laid floor – culminating in us both sliding across the circle on our knees, arms flung in fashionably dramatic angles. We eventually called in quits in a surprisingly sober decision before someone got hurt, although my knees are splendidly bruised from my efforts.

At 11:30pm the power cut (or somebody in power cut the power), and that’s about all I could remember… the pieces were filled in for me the next day.

It was fan-tas-mic.

Yesterday, I decided to attempt being all domestic (again) – it was time to make Banana Bread. As usual, this entailed reading the recipe and then choosing to ignore instructions. Instead of this, I’ll use this… I don’t have that, so I’ll just make do with that…

I don’t have an electric beater, but after what felt like several days of hard labour and manual beating (and a few minor repetitive stress related injuries), I finally decided that batter was sufficiently ‘creamed’.

I don’t have a bread loaf either so I decided that muffin tins would work.

They didn’t.

My banana bread muffins took forever to cook, despite the fact that I was opening the oven to check on them every 15 minutes, so I eventually lost patience and decided to physically pull them out of the baking tray. This didn’t work so well either, as I now had half-baked muffins, half out and half still obstinately wedged in their muffin constraints.

I gave up on those and decided that the remaining batter was now going to be spread across a baking tray and they were going to become Banana bread crunchies, or the newly-termed ‘Bananchies.’

This didn’t work so well either as they kinda crusted on the top, but not underneath which means that technically they should be called Banana bread 'squishies' more than anything else.

Amazingly, and despite my best efforts to sell them to my family and friends, nobody was too enthused to try my Banana Bread-muffin-crunchie-squishies.

Oh well, all the more for me…