Whenever I think of my greatest food weakness, I always narrow it down to freshly baked bread. The delirious, glorious smell of fresh bread has always sent me into a complete tailspin. During my early twenties, I spent a summer during university working the storefront of a family-run bakery in Regina and it was pretty much a dream come true for me and my deep love of carbs. A good portion of my summer paycheck went back to that bakery and I would stock up on their homemade bread, dinner rolls, poppy seed loaf, and their daily cinnamon buns.

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Last week I was hit with a horrendous case of the common cold that left me sniffling, sneezing and hacking for days on end. Monday, I was fine. Tuesday, I was a little congested. But by Wednesday, I was a mess and had to call in sick. I think my co-workers were secretly gracious because besides being contagious, they were able to get a break from listening to me sneeze and blow my nose every 5 minutes.

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The last few months have been difficult since my Grandma passed away. Late last year we were informed that her cancer had returned and then she left peacefully in the second week of January. I barely had a chance to register the former and then we were thrown head first into Christmas. Suddenly we were wrapping presents, baking and making the most of the holidays. On January 2nd, a couple hours before our plane was to leave, I hugged her and silently wished her goodbye in my head because I knew I would never be able to say the words out loud.

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The weather is ever so slowly warming up here and I’m already in full-on spring cleaning mode. No closet is safe, my friend. On the kitchen front, I’ve spent a good part of this past week tackling the freezer. Our main goal right now is, before our next big grocery trip, we need to use up all of the random, half-eaten items that were shoved into the back, forgotten corners of the freezer. Random mostly eaten bags of frozen fruits and vegetables, a half consumed package of farmer’s market pierogies, singles of flatbread and tortilla shells, scattered trays of ice cubes, frozen bread ends (for breadcrumbs!), broken squares of half-eaten dark chocolate bars and endless twist-tied mini baggies of sliced almonds, pecans, walnuts, sunflower seeds and pepita seeds are just some of the many treasures I’ve uncovered.

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One of the things I love about our condo is the amount of natural sunlight we get on a sunny day. When we first moved in, I couldn’t get enough of it because I could rush home from work (shorter commute, yay!) and I still had enough time to take my photos. It was so bright we could go most evenings without turning on our living room, dining room or kitchen lights as long as we kept our window blinds open. It was August and I was completely delusional.

Enter November and daylight saving time. I knew it was too good to last and that’s when I began my hunt for an artificial light.

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If you take a look through my recipe archive, you’ll notice that I tend to favour certain ingredients more than others. Besides fruit, some of my most common baking ingredients are chocolate, espresso and peanut butter. Baking with chocolate is obvious because chocolate anything is delicious. If chocolate is the main ingredient, I’ll add a quick dash of espresso to enhance the delicious chocolatey flavour. Peanut butter is a common baking staple because we always have some in our kitchen and Trevor is a fan of anything I make with peanut butter. Plus peanut butter and chocolate together rocks.

Speaking of peanut butter and chocolate, I’d been meaning to make this recipe for a while now, but until recently I was so convinced that I had already posted a peanut butter chocolate banana bread recipe. Does this happen to anyone else? A couple months ago, I had planned on making white chocolate cranberry cookies only to realize that I had already posted a recipe back in 2011. Since then, whenever I have a recipe in mind, I panic and search my archives to make sure I’m not accidentally repeating myself.

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It’s no secret here that I love cinnamon buns. If you do a quick search in my search bar, you’ll notice that I’ve posted a few other cinnamon bun recipes, ranging from an adaptation of Ree Drummond’s famous recipe to a quick and easy muffin recipe laced with delicious cinnamon spread. And what’s not to love about a sweet and gooey cinnamon bun? Hot from the oven, drizzled in warm icing and sticky with the luscious mixture of cinnamon, butter and sugar, I would climb over my own husband for one. A perfect afternoon for me would consist of a cinnamon bun + a cup of hot tea + a good book.

In fact, a couple weeks ago I decided right then and there that I wanted this perfect afternoon to happen and set out to make cinnamon buns. The conditions were perfect. The weather outside was cold and snowy, Trevor, still not feeling well, was drinking copious amounts of tea and until that moment, I was pacing around the apartment wondering what I was going to do since I was stuck inside on a snowy day with a sick husband.

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After weeks of off and on hot and cold weather, I believe it’s finally safe to say that it is officially summer in Toronto. There have been a few days of scorching temperatures and some heat advisory warnings that make me grateful to know that I get to spend the majority of my days in my air-conditioned office building. Our apartment doesn’t have such luxuries, but we did recently purchase a fancy stand-up fan that has been making the living room bearable.

With the return of summer, this also means that the kitchen oven will be off for the time being. For suppers, we’ve been relying a bit more on our slow cooker and have really taken to slow-cooked chicken. On one particular day, the chicken smelled so fantastic that I broke my oven-off rule and made these savoury salted rosemary buns. I’m such a rebel.

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All right, I’m going to be honest. All week I’ve been dreaming about this banana bread. Everyday, always around 3pm, I would be in the middle of something at work when (!!) suddenly an intense snack craving would hit me. I know better than to keep a snack drawer at my desk (it would always be empty), so I’ve been stuck with whatever I brought from home which at that point of the day was usually an apple or nothing at all because the apple may have been eaten by 11am.

There was one day though where I decided to be smart and bring a slice of this banana bread to avoid the 3pm cravings. This failed miserably because the bread was gone by 9:30am and then the apple followed at 11am. I think that was a stressful day.

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Despite my running around and getting ready for my Japan trip next week (8 days), I knew I had to celebrate the first day of Fall yesterday with some delicious baking. This is my favourite time of the year (sweaters! boots! hot mugs of tea!) and I was a little sad to realize that as much as I love this season, I only have one other pumpkin recipe on She Bakes Here.

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