There’s a reason it’s called Dillo Day. From sunrise to sunset, you’ll be on your feet trying to make the absolute most of Northwestern’s favorite annual tradition. Dillo might even be the earliest you’ve gotten up on a Saturday in a while– and as you’re rushing to get ready and trying to figure out where exactly that one missing friend is, breakfast might fall to the wayside. But how are you supposed to last the whole day without it?
My advice: prep the night before! Pre-Dillo breakfast baking has become my favorite Dillo tradition yet. Last year, a friend and I spent the night before Dillo flipping pancakes that our friends could eat on the way out in the morning. This year, we kicked things up a few gears.
A good Dillo breakfast item is something that’s low effort and transportable day-of, which is why muffins are a great option.
NYT Jordan Marsh’s Blueberry Muffins
There’s a reason these blueberry muffins have a five-star rating. Even better, they have a super simple ingredient list: flour, sugar, butter, milk, eggs, vanilla and baking powder. Since we wanted to bake a lot of different items, I tried to pick recipes that used the same basic ingredients, making it cost-effective and easy to shop for everything.
Using a recipe as quick and easy as this one also helped control the chaos as we tried to get everything into the oven. The only issue I ran into was getting the muffins out of the tin afterwards. Normally, I find you can skip muffin liners or parchment paper if you grease the tray, but these did get stuck when we tried to pop them out, so I would use liners in this case.
NYT King Arthur Flour’s Banana Crumb Muffins
The only additional ingredients required for this recipe were baking soda, cinnamon and bananas instead of blueberries. While the recipe specifies King Arthur flour, the Target store brand worked great.
These muffins had a couple more steps than the previous ones to create the crumble topping, but it was absolutely delicious. To add more flavor I mixed in a little cinnamon into the batter to match the topping and sprinkled in some allspice since I had it on hand.
Bon Appétit Blackout Chocolate Banana Bread
This was our most involved recipe, but we wanted to do something a little extra special for Dillo. That being said, I did simplify it slightly: I used all-purpose flour instead of mixing it with whole wheat, sprinkled regular sugar on top at the end instead of demerara, and used chocolate chips instead of chopped bittersweet chocolate.
I also have an 8.5” by 4.5” loaf pan rather than the 9” by 5” called for in the recipe, so I scaled down the ingredient quantities to be about ⅔ of the original. (In the past, I have found that it works to bake 9” by 5” recipes in an 8.5” by 4.5” pan if you keep it in the oven longer with a tinfoil tent.) It came out wonderfully dense, soft and chocolatey despite these adjustments. If you don’t have five ripe bananas, you could definitely make this recipe with four and skip the banana slice garnish on top.
To round things out, we used a dual pancake and waffle batter mix to make chocolate chip pancakes and heart-shaped waffles. While this definitely increased our egg tally, they were easy breakfast classics to make on the stove while the oven was preoccupied baking our other sweet treats
All that dancing, singing and partying works up an appetite! I’m happy to report we didn’t have a single item left over.