I had a whole bunch of bananas slowly going black in my kitchen, and I said to myself, “Self, what should we do with all these bananas?” I whipped open How To Be A Domestic Goddess and thought Nigella’s recipe for Banana Bread sounded good, except it had raisins—golden raisins, to be exact; sultanas, if you’re on the other side of the Pond—and I’m not terribly fond of raisins in my food. Then I noticed at the bottom that she had a note about making a version of this for some of her friends, substituting cocoa for some of the flour and adding chocolate chips.
Well, okay, Nigella, if you insist:
1 cup plain flour
2 tablespoons cocoa powder
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
125g unsalted butter, melted
150g sugar
2 large eggs
4 small, very ripe bananas (about 300g weighed without skins), mashed
4 ounces chocolate chips
1 teaspoon vanilla extractPreheat the oven to 325ºF. Put the flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, baking soda and salt in a medium-sized bowl and combine well — stirring with a wooden spoon worked just fine for me. Once the dry ingredients are combined, then stir in the chocolate chips and get them coated.
Mash the bananas in a second bowl — you could go all out and use a food processor to reduce them to a liquid or cream, but I used a potato masher and ended up with some lumps of banana in the mixture, which turned out great.
In a large bowl, mix the melted butter and sugar and beat until blended. Beat the eggs into the butter/sugar mixture one at a time, then the mashed bananas. Then, with your wooden spoon, stir in the vanilla extract. Add the flour mixture, a third at a time, stirring well after each bit.
Scrape into the loaf pan and bake in the middle of the oven for 1 to 1 and a quarter hours. (I made two loaves at once, and the hour and 15 minutes worked perfectly.) When it’s done, an inserted toothpick or fine skewer should come out cleanish — surprisingly, even though I’d used chocolate chips, no chocolate came out on the toothpick. Leave in the pan on a rack to cool.
This was delicious — very banana, very chocolate, not gooey. The chocolate chips were even distributed through the cake, which was great. I will definitely make this one again—it took approximately ten minutes to throw together, and then all I had to do was wait for it to bake. In fact, I left it in the pan to cool overnight, so it made an excellent breakfast treat in the morning.
I made two loaves (lots of bananas), so Darin took one to work. One of his team members yelled, “Cake!” and within seconds the entire loaf was gone.
I might try a little extra cocoa powder next time, for a much more chocolate taste to the bread, or maybe I’ll get some black cocoa from King Arthur and try that out.