Banana Marshmallow Casserole

Reason #1,973 that I love David Michael Sloan: the Elders Quorum was having a dessert contest on Friday night, and the men had to make the desserts entirely by themselves. Any help from the wives disqualified them. Well, Dave had arrived home from Baltimore late the night before, and he had to leave early the next morning for work, which meant he would have precisely one hour to make this dessert. Furthermore, when he called home at 4 pm to check on us, I was bordering on a nervous breakdown from having spent hours on the phone with our mortgage lender and title company while the kids blissfully destroyed the house around me. So Dave swooped home, took the girls to the grocery store for some quick ingredients, and then assembled this dessert of his while his wife kvetched at him for 45 minutes.

What resulted was banana marshmallow casserole. Dave had googled "quick and easy dessert recipes," and had been intrigued by this one recipe for a caramelized banana sauce to be served over ice-cream. But since we didn't have ice-cream but we DID have a lot of marshmallows, Dave decided to experiment. In short order, brown sugar, cream, and butter were bubbling away on the stove, and Dave had sliced up an inordinate amount of slightly green bananas. Next up, he lined a 9x13 casserole dish with vanilla wafers and marshmallows. With five minutes before we had to leave, he added the bananas to the sauce pan and let them stew for a bit. Then as we were loading kids in the car, he ladled the banana-caramel sauce over the marshmallows and vanilla wafers, and we were off. On the way over, I voiced my skepticism.

"Dave, your dessert looks like soggy bananas. You need to cover it with cool whip or something." Dave surveyed the pan. "Yeah, I guess so--let's swing by Kroger's really quickly."

He jumped out of the car and came running back with a can of Reddi-Whip. Which, as it turns out, melts if sprayed onto boiling hot bananas. As do marshmallows, I should mention. Which made Dave's dessert a bunch of brown bananas and mushy vanilla wafers, swimming in a sea of melted marshmallows, whipped cream, and caramel sauce.

"So Dave," I began cautiously, "What exactly was your strategy here? How competitive were you expecting to be? Because I think maybe someone else would have stuck with something involving chocolate, something a little more tried and true."

I thought I was making a good point. I thought I was showing Dave that in order to win a contest determined by popular voting, you really had to think about what would appeal to an audience. But then Dave proved to me, yet again, why being married to him brings constant delight to me.

"No, I couldn't do something like that," he said. "That's just not interesting, I've done that before. I wanted to try something that hasn't been done before."

And just like that, I suddenly saw the whole evening differently. It wasn't a competition to be won, it wasn't even some routine thing to show support for the Elders Quorum. It was an opportunity to learn something new, to do something new. And even with few hours of sleep, a long day at work, a grumpy wife, and a totally trashed house, Dave still had the buoyancy of spirit to be up for doing something new.

The banana marshmallow casserole? A total flop. An oreo/cream-cheese dessert won, closely followed by a delicious chocolate flourless cake.

"Love," Dave said as we drove home, "I totally, completely, absolutely dominated the category of ugliest dessert."

But you know what? Those other ladies can keep their oreo-and-chocolate-cake husbands. I'll keep Dave. And I'm willing to bet that banana marshmallow goulash will make a great base for ice cream milkshakes.