Banana Chocolate Bread

I'm not much of a cook. But I do love a good bake. Although I'm sadly still quite inexperienced in the world of flour, ovens and ear piercing smoke alarms. (No don't worry, I'm not THAT bad. I don't think)

So whilst I'm not very good at coming up with my own recipes, I find I can learn new recipes very quickly, or maybe I just have a knack of finding ridiculously easy recipes to whip up in the kitchen aid and throw into the oven.



Like this one from butter sugar flour (although she's now moved to toasty biscuit)- a delicious banana chocolate bread. I had made it once a few months ago and been very happy with the result, so when I knew I was going to have the boys over again, I thought it might be a nice little thing to whip up. (And I was really in the mood to bake and take pictures of the process and result. Ulterior motives! Oooh la la!)



I mean, heavens know, look how BIG and ripe the bananas are! They are just begging to be baked!



It's a beautifully simple one bowl wonder, which makes cleaning up so simple (well bowl and a half, it's still very easy cleaning)! The first time I made this recipe I did use chocolate and chop it up finely, but this time I was a bit lazy and just used chocolate chips. While it came out well, I think the chopped chocolate works better as it distributes more evenly through the bread, the chocolate chips tend to get a bit heavy and sink towards the bottom of the bread!



It came out a bit burnt looking initially (so I've discovered our oven is a little stronger than I expected....), mum later informed me that because it's so high in sugar because of the bananas I need to be more careful....







But it was much better after coming out of the tin, cut fresh, with the chocolate still soft and melted and had with a cup of tea.

Banana Chocolate Bread (From butter sugar flour)

250g plain flour

2.5 teaspoons baking powder

big pinch of salt

125g dark or milk chocolate, finely chopped

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 cup caster sugar

2 large eggs

4 large, ripe bananas, mashed (don’t add anymore bananas – it will be too stodgy).

1. Preheat oven to 200C. Grease and line a loaf tin and set aside.
2. In a bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder and salt. Stir through the chocolate.
3. In a larger bowl, mix together the eggs, sugar, vanilla and banana.
4. Gently combine the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients and be careful not to over mix.
5. Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake for 45 minutes or until golden brown and a skewer inserted in the centre comes out clean.
6. Cool on a wire rack, but eat it warm. It tastes good toasted the next day too