Eat Your Feelings: First Day of School Gooey Breakfast Cake

Fourth grade, Second grade.

Dear Reader,

This year the first day of school came too soon. I couldn't figure out why this formerly joyous day was now bittersweet, and then I realized: this year I like my kids more. Of course I have always loved my children, I'm not a monster, but they're a little older now and we can do stuff together besides playing Memory or reading over and over about the cranky trains on the Island of Sodor. They're real people now! Sometimes they even give me the finger! (Not in an out-and-out F.U. kind of finger-giving way, but more like an "Oof, I got something in my eye," while wiping your eye with your middle finger kind of way.) So today, I packed them off to school and actually can't wait for them to get home.

I wanted to make them something delicious for breakfast - not only because they are awesome and they deserve it, but because I knew I would be exhausted and bleary-eyed this morning. And let's face it, the first day of school can really, really suck. Just ask my brother whose best friend thought that dying his hair platinum would help with the bullying. Wrong! He was wrong! Oh so very, very wrong! Then he tried to dye it back to brown and wound up with green hair, oh the torture! Don't worry though, cause that kid grew up to be team President for the World Series Champion San Francisco Giants, so suck it Eric Berg, you mean bully.

Last night I whipped up a banana bread for the kids, but no ordinary banana bread was this. To make my bread really yummy and special for awesome kids like mine, (and yours I am sure), here's what I do: I rub butter all over the inside of the loaf pan, as usual, but then I sprinkle in sugar, the same way you would if you were to flour the inside of a pan, but see, I used sugar! Ten minutes before the thing is finished baking, I pull it out, dot butter on the top and sprinkle on more sugar! So the outside of the bread is super gooey and sweet and so freaking good. This works with any quick bread and is especially good if you have that raw sugar with the big crystals which can be obtained for free at Starbucks if you're sneaky or just cheap.

Of course the banana bread recipe I prefer is the You Were a Bully In Middle School Banana Bread from my book, which you can buy even if you are cheap because it is only $9.67 on Amazon.

Enjoy.