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.
This looks great and I have some suspect bananas that need to be used up. BUT – the ingredients are in cups, grams AND ounces. How much butter/sugar did you use?
I try to measure everything by weight these days — mostly because it’s more accurate, but also because I buy butter in giant blocks at Trader Joe’s (pound blocks of Plugra cost less there than the half-pound size at Whole Foods!). I can’t measure out a “cup” the way you can with a stick of butter, so I put all my measurements in grams when I can.
According to Nigella’s recipe (US edition), you need 1/2 cup sugar and 1/2 cup unsalted butter, melted. I have no idea why I have the sugar in grams too — that’s very odd. I must have weighed it or something while doing the recipe. (Nigella’s Kitchen website has many of her recipes from the UK edition, which I prefer because — natch — it has the weights of the ingredients instead of the volumes, but they didn’t have it for this one.)
Thanks. I did covert the grams into ounces and then approximated the cups so 1/2 cup melted butter and I used just under 2/3 cup sugar. Came out great though! Oh, I did add a little extra flour and cut the levening agents in half but that’s because I’m a hi-altitude baker.
I’ve just mixed this all together and thrown it in the oven. I was feeling rather pleased with myself for a minute, until I read through the ingredients again. Two tablespoons of cocoa powder – how could I have forgotten the cocoa powder! Ah ha! It’s been left out of the preparation instructions. I realise that I should have picked up on this while mixing it all together; however, this would be about the second thing I’ve ever tried making and, being but a mere novice, I was so focussed on following the instructions to the letter that I didn’t give it a thought. Please, please, please add this step so others of equally inept skill will not make the same mistake I made.
I hope it still tastes nice.
Augh! I’m sorry about that!
It should still taste nice — what you’ve made is banana chocolate chip bread, which is fairly tasty on its own! (In fact, the last couple of times I’ve made this recipe, I’ve left the cocoa powder out for this very reason.)
You were right, it tasted great! What with the delicious aroma emanating from the kitchen and a house full of hungry savages, it was all I could do to stop the wife and kids devouring it straight out of the baking tin.
Thanks