early morning Cinnamon Toffee Banana Bread

"I love the abstract, delicate, profound, vague, voluptuously wordless sensation
of living ecstatically."

~ Anaïs Nin, from a letter to Henry Miller, in A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, 1932-1953

This banana bread is my love letter to you. The first loaf fell. Literally. I had everything arranged for a photo shoot; slices splayed out in pseudo-haphazard fashion, errant scatterings of flour, an odd number of eggs peeking around the corners of wrinkled napkins, and a wayward scoop of ground cinnamon...everything was perfectly imperfect. Obviously my straight-laced background board felt left out of the peppered chaos. After one sip of coffee and an accidental nudge on the table with my pointy elbow, the entire scene folded in on itself. I laughed, uncontrollably, amid cracked eggs, a mangled bread loaf, flour-coated jeans & a slimy floor. This, coupled with snow on a Sunday in mid-April, broke the dam that had been held together with celery twine and thread bare hopes of spring. Honestly, I could not stop laughing.

After sitting on the floor in a pile of flour and inhaling a few surviving slices with a cold cup of coffee, I cleaned up the drama and went about making another loaf. Because I know you will be smitten. xo
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