Campfire Banana Boats Sundaes

When I was a little girl, we had a lot of cookouts. Someone was always building a fire and cooking something over open flames. My favorite things to cook in the fire were banana boats. They’re quite easy:

1. Wrap a banana, peel attached, loosely in aluminum foil.
2. Slit the banana open to form a boat.
3. Stuff the opening with chocolate chips and marshmallows.
4. Seal the aluminum foil and place the package in the campfire, down in the coals.
5. Wait 5 or 10 minutes, carefully remove the package from the coals, let it cool (which takes forever), and eat with a spoon.

It is one of those foods that instantly makes me feel like a kid again: mushy cooked banana, sweet gooey marshmallows, and creamy melted chocolate. Every bite is a memory. Campfire banana boats are not without problems. Because of the foil and the banana peel, they stay hot forever. You have to either set them down or burn your fingers trying to get to the gooey chocobanana mess inside. Sometimes both. I digress. My mom likes these a lot, too, and she figured out an easier way to make them. That’s the recipe below. I took lots of pictures to make it seem more like a real recipe than it really is. As I mentioned, the thing that has always bugged me about banana boats is that they take so long to cool. I never wait long enough, and I always burn my tongue on molten banana and chocolate. Always. Sometimes twice. Patience isn’t one of my finer points. Turning them into ice cream sundaes completely negates this problem. The introduction of ice cream makes the banana cool almost instantly. You’ll be eating your banana boat less than a minute after it comes out of the microwave. (Do be careful and check to make sure it’s cool enough to eat, and don’t sue me if you burn yourself.)

Grace thought these were awesome. She called them special bananas. Then she screamed, My banana melted! EWWWWW! and wouldn’t touch it again. Bananas do get very soft when they’re cooked, but they don’t exactly melt. I think it was the combination of mushy banana and melting ice cream that gave her the heeby jeebies. I ate hers after she left the table. It was delicious.

Have you ever made banana boats?

Is this how you do it? What’s your method?  

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