Chocolate banana bread

Bananas, white and milk chocolate chunks, and a sugary, crispy crust. What’s not to like? This is a pleasingly easy recipe, and I was very pleased with the reaction when I came up with it the other evening – the entire loaf vanished before I was able to boil the kettle for a pot of tea.

For one disappearing banana miracle loaf, you’ll need:

3 ripe bananas
100g white chocolate
100g milk chocolate
180g plain flour
150g soft light brown sugar + 2 tablespoons to sprinkle
40g salted butter (softened)
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

Preheat the oven to 190°C (375°F). Grease a 9×5 inch loaf tin.

Sift the flour from a height into a large bowl with the bicarbonate of soda and baking powder. In another bowl, use an electric mixer to cream the sugar and butter together until they are pale in colour. Use the back of a fork to mash the bananas, and use the mixer to whip them into the butter and sugar mixture for two minutes.

Wallop the chocolate, still in its packets, with a rolling pin to reduce it to chunks. (This is a lot cheaper than buying dedicated chunks for baking, and the chocolate will probably be of a higher quality too.) Use a spatula to fold the chocolate chunks and contents of the banana bowl into the flour as gently as you can – if you’ve ever eaten a disappointingly solid banana bread it’s almost certainly because the batter has been overhandled. Use the spatula to shuffle the mixture into the loaf tin, sprinkle the top with the extra sugar and bake on a middle shelf of the oven for 45 minutes. Check a skewer comes out clean – if it doesn’t, pop a piece of tin foil on top of the tin to stop the top from going too brown and add another 10 minutes to the cooking time. Cool for quarter of an hour in the tin, then move to a rack to finish cooling (or eat immediately, which is what we did, and very nice it was too).

8 Replies to “Chocolate banana bread”

  1. Basic recipe is very similar to mine, but I add a couple of eggs. Will have to see how it goes without the eggs. I'm 'ripening' some bananas for the very purpose at the moment, my freezer stock has run out.

  2. Hi Margot! I still say tea. ;-p

    And hello Robyn! I learned the no-eggs trick from a vegan colleague years ago (the only vegan I've ever met who was doing it for ethical reasons rather than trying to disguise an eating disorder, but that's another story). Bananas work surprisingly well to bind a cake, and I've used them before when I've been out of eggs (amazingly good in a chocolate cake, actually). That said, if you're making a vegan cake you'll be missing out on the butter, obviously (ex-colleague had a cake recipe which used rapeseed oil, which was just dreadful) – and you'll also miss out on normal sugar, which according to my friend is bleached using the DEAD BONES OF COWS.

    I am quite fond of the dead bones of cows, so I don't really have a problem with this, but if you have visiting vegans, special, overpriced vegan sugars are available in those shops that smell of beans.

  3. even though I have a life long aversion to all things banana, your description ,manages to make it sound so tempting. . . Thanks again. Did you succeed in getting a snap of the rainbow? We've had 3 incredible ones in Sheffield this week.

  4. Hi Kevin! No joy getting a pic here, unfortunately – did you? I've just bought a new camera, actually – but this is something that probably deserves its own post later in the week when I've had a chance to play with it a bit!

  5. Unfortunately not, but I have discovered Twitpic which should make it easier/more convenient. Cheers for the tweets too (I follow under username charjoe). Off to pick some blackberries from an overgrown allotment across the road……..

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *