Yes, sir, we have no bananas...

I return to blogging to complain a little: I bought the Babycakes cookbook last week because Steve's lactose-intolerant and I'm lactose-sensitive-ish and we love cake and vegan baking is new and enticing and promising to me, so cookbooks in this genre are interesting.

Also, the book is beautiful. Four color and glossy pages! Photos of all the recipes! And, for reasons unknown to me, it has really posed, cheesecake photos of the founder and her co-bakers. Like, their hair is all did and they're eyeing the camera suggestively as they frost cupcakes in their matching 50s uniforms, as if they employed only sexy ladies and no Mexican labor in the kitchen at all. (Which could be true, I've never been to the bakery.)

Babycakes is, I derive from the text, a dairy-free, gluten-free bakery in Manhattan that celebrities love. I decided to try the banana bread recipe first because a) cupcakes are labor-intensive and I just wanted to whip something up quick; and b) Mary Louise Parker with too much makeup on endorses it on the facing page.

It calls for a lot of funky ingredients, and I was briefly tempted to just use regular flour because we don't have gluten allergies. However, the introduction explicitly warns to follow the recipe as closely as possible. Tom Colicchio, who wrote the foreword, said if I followed the recipe exactly, it'd be a winner every time. That's two warnings! I'm no fool.

So, I went to our local hippie health store and got the gluten-free flour and the agave nectar and the xanthum gum and the coconut oil. It was not cheap, but the healthy choice rarely is.

Two questions came to me during preparation: it calls for 6 mashed bananas, I just used 5, and I still had enough banana slop to fill a small mixing bowl. Do I really use all of this? Well, I'd better, or Collichio will be on my tail.

Steve: "It'd be better if they gave a measurement rather than the number of bananas."

Stacy: "Ya, but if you're going to the grocery store, you're not going to know how many bananas units equal 1 c. of mashed."

B #2: coconut oil is an ingredient I've never used, and its solid at room temperature. Am I supposed to melt this before measuring it out? Maybe its supposed to remain solid and I just need to whip it really well to incorporate? I used it solid since there was no instruction to do otherwise.

Results: way too moist to be called a bread or cake. It had a really hard time firming up in the baking time it instructed (35 minutes.) I'm pretty sure it was the combination of too many bananas and my incorrect decision to use the coconut oil solid. Tasty and edible, yes, but hardly bread like: more like a banana bread pudding.

I Googled to see if there was an errata list already, and learned on the Babycakes blog that the cookbook authors now recommend 1.5 c. of mashed bananas, or roughly 3 bananas. That's HALF of what was printed in the book!

Reading through the same blog post comments, I see that people have been having problems with the other recipes. The frosting didn't set up in the refrigerator properly for some people, and we learn on Martha Stewart's website (Babycakes did a cooking demo on the show) that a different proportion of ingredients is necessary. Lots of people want substitutes for the bean flours because the bean flavor is undesirable to them.

I'm getting this feeling these recipes weren't home-tested properly, and that's really unfortunate because successful baking depends on precision.

I feel for these ladies at Babycakes, though. Reading through the comments on the blog has given me an education on food allergies and its clear they cannot please everyone when you have some readers saying they are on a gluten-free, dairy-free, sugar-free and nightshade-free diet, but still want delicious cake.

The loudest complaint seems to be that half of the recipes use spelt flour, which is not gluten-free, and the cookbook proclaims loudly on the cover that it is a gluten-free cookbook. That seems a legitimate complaint to me.

Still, half the fun of cooking is expermentation, so I'm not chucking it right away. I'm just hoping they do the decent thing and come out with an official errata list or something because, honestly, 3 bananas instead of 6 is an error, and its not enough to bury the correction in your blog.