Chocolate Banana Bread

Chocolate Banana Bread is one of my favourite recipes. 

This recipe is so good, I have been asked to enter it into cooking competitions.

Of course, I haven't entered my chocolate banana bread into anything except people's mouths!

The recipe is adapted from Bill Grainger’s book, Bills Food.

What's really good about making chocolate banana bread is that it's an extra-delicious way of using up those poor old bananas that went off before you got to eat them.

If you end up with a whole lot of bananas that are bruised or even black, then you can freeze them and use them later to make this yummy recipe.

One trick to making this recipe is NOT to over mix the dough. Make sure there's a few floury bits that aren't quite mixed in. For some reason, this keeps the mixture moist.

Ingredients

2 cups plain flour
2 tsp baking power
125g (4 1/2 oz) unsalted butter, softened
1 cup caster sugar
4 ripe (over ripe works even better) bananas, mashed
2 eggs, lightly beaten
1 tsp vanilla extract
175g (1 cup) choc bits (I use those BIG choc buttons and put the WHOLE packet in!)

Method

Preheat oven to 180 C (350F).
Sift flour & baking powder in one bowl.
In another bowl, mix bananas, butter, sugar, eggs, vanilla ex. and choc chips.
Then add dry ingredients, but don’t overmix.
Pour the batter into a non-stick loaf tin & bake for about 1hr 15min (about 50min in fanforced oven), or until bread is cooked when tested with a skewer.
Cool in tin 5 min before turning out on wire rack.

Just remember: don't over mix the dough.

Also, take care with a fan-forced over as the cooking times can be much shorter (45 min in our oven).

I really hope you love this recipe as much as we all do! Chocolate banana bread is an absolute favourite in this house.