Last Saturday was a friend's birthday, and just saying that tells me that I need to come up with more epithets for my friends and relatives.  Oh well.  For now the subject of the birthday party, and the names of the guests can remain discreetly obscure. Suffice to say that I felt that it was incumbent on me to bring food. 

I ended up thinking about my usual easily portable recipes and feeling rather ambivalent about all of them.  Yes, dear readers, I confess I was feeling a bit jaded, and a bit thwarted by circumstance.  Some food items are just awkward if one is going to walk to a party with them.  Some should be served warm, and I'd never been to the abode of this particular friend before, and so did not feel equal to commandeering the kitchen upon arrival.  So, I did what any sensible woman in my position would do.  I baked cookies -- coconut macaroons to be precise.  I used the recipe in The Joy of Cooking, 1997 edition.  I commend it to your attention.  It's easy.  It's quick.  The bit of the recipe that takes the longest is scooping the dough onto the well greased cookie sheets (preferably lined with parchment paper) and baking them.  However the recipe calls for one egg white.  Yolk's on me, etc.

The obvious thing to do, rather than waste the yolk, was bake a cake.  Well, I thought it was the obvious thing to do anyway.  I had some old bananas that wanted using up.  A little research, and I'd written out a recipe for a Banana Upside Down Cake.  It smelled delicious.

However, I was back at food items that are inconvenient to carry, though less impossibly so than a pot of spaghetti sauce.  Unfortunately I couldn't leave the cake home, because I was going to spend the rest of the long weekend out of town, and how on earth could I manage to eat the entire thing by myself?  Actually I knew how I would manage to eat the entire thing: enthusiastically, but at the expense of eating things with more actual nutritive value.  So the cake had to be shared. 

Which was how I found myself walking down the hill under a sky that would have been starry, had the city lights not drowned it out, while carrying a cake, and a shopping bag with a container of macaroons.  It was delightful, partly because of the absurdity of walking more than a block while carrying a cake.  I got to the party, and discovered that everyone had had similar ideas about what to bring.  I think I may have come home with more dessert than I arrived with.

Now I need to figure out what to make for this weekend's round of feasting.