Chocolate Chunk Banana Bread

This banana bread is especially good. It is moist, with an intense banana flavor and with a more subtle undercurrent of caramel from the dark brown sugar. Add big chunks of chocolate to make this loaf cake absolutely irresistible.

Instead of making it in a large loaf pan, you can make it in little loaf pans (6″x4″). If you have five extra-ripe bananas lying around, you can make a big batch of batter and get 9 mini loaves. If you can find the 4.25″ square foil cups, you can make  12-13 mini square cakes.

These freeze well and make nice gifts.

My Favorite Banana Cake

This is the best banana cake. And I have tried a lot of banana cake recipes.  It is even delicious made with all-purpose flour instead of cake flour, Earth’s Best Margarine instead of butter, and soy milk instead of butter.

If you want to take this over the top, add some crumb topping and chocolate chips.

Banana Tea Bread

I have been looking over The Essential NYT Cookbook, edited by Amanda Hesser. I was in a rush before Shabbos, so I opted for two quick cakes: the Amazon cake and the Banana Tea Bread (p. 655).

Both were delicious.

I tweaked the banana bread a bit, partly according to the advice in the headnote to the recipe, and partly based on my running low on vegetable oil. I ended up using 2 tablespoons of olive oil, and it was quite nice. The small amount of olive oil added a very subtle but distinct flavor which made the tea bread more interesting.

My favorite banana bread is still a clone of Entenmann’s crumb topped chocolate chip banana loaf–I still have to post about that! But this banana bread is healthier.