This recipe sprang to mind while doing some baking and preparation work for the weekly Cafe we run every Tuesday at Edith Avenue Baptist in Saint John, New Brunswick ( see Where the Name Comes From for the full story of the Cafe).
I love doing banana bread because it is a great way to use up stuff. For example, yogurt past its best before date. As an aside, while doing volunteer work at the Saint John East Food Bank during the summer of 2011, I was in conversation with several clients about doing cooking with extra food so it does not spoil.
Told them of buying too much strawberry yogurt and needing a way to use it. What goes good with bananas but strawberries so I substituted the yogurt for the milk component of the recipe and made a tasty banana bread. I asked the clients to consider how they could stretch their food dollars by working together to creatively use food resources.
So back to the trip to Chocolate Cranberry Heaven. Making this banana bread I discovered the pantry was lacking sufficient chocolate chips. So I substituted cocoa powder for the chips. And because the cranberries were sweetened and the cocoa was not, a nice balance was obtained in the bread being not too sweet. So Note -- if going to try this and I will post a recipe, use an unsweetened cocoa powder.
One of the tastiest banana breads I have ever made soon came forth out of the oven. I left one at the house and took the other to the Cafe the next day at the church. Talk about a bread doing a disappearing act! I was busy with other matters and when I returned to the Cafe, one of the workers said did you get a piece of that bread? It was some good! I chuckled and replied, what? You thought I would bring all of it over to the Cafe today? I left some home today.
It is an enjoyable day when people can be delighted by a new creation. Or maybe someone else has made this, probably. But it was a new creation to those at the Cafe. And isn't that when we are at our best? When we are creating? According to classical theism as defined by St. Thomas of Aquinas,
However, St. Thomas also explains that God shares his perfections with his creatures by inviting them to participate in his causality, which in the world manifests itself in his governance of his creation:
But since things which are governed should be brought to perfection by government, this government will be so much the better in the degree the things governed are brought to perfection. Now it is a greater perfection for a thing to be good in itself and also the cause of goodness in others, than only to be good in itself. Therefore God so governs things that He makes some of them to be causes of others in government; as a master, who not only imparts knowledge to his pupils, but gives also the faculty of teaching others. (Summa theologiae, I.103.6)
To put it another way, according to St. Thomas, it is a greater perfection, and therefore, more fitting, for God to share his causality with his creatures, making them authentic causes that can cause by their own natures, than for God to remain the sole cause acting within creation.
From -- http://biologos.org/blog/st-thomas-aquinas-and-the-fittingness-of-evolutionary-creation-part-1
If our purpose s found in sharing in the creative power of God while God remains the sole cause of creation; then does that not help to explain the sheer pleasure we get from creating something and bring pleasure to others by our act of creating?
That day at the Cafe, I got a glimpse again of the pleasure one can bring to others by creating and sharing that which one creates with others. Even food. Yes even food. Go forth and create and help to realize your potential and reason you were created.
Now the recipe or the route by which you might travel to get to that Chocolate Cranberry Heaven shall be shared later I promise.
Grace and Peace
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