I came back from my trip to Cincinnati to find 5 overripe bananas sitting on our kitchen counter. So ripe that they were hours away from needing to die in the trash can. I can’t stand food waste. I’ll force myself to eat leftovers for several days past when I should because I hate throwing food away. So I grabbed my cookbooks, searching for an emergency banana bread recipe, and what do you know, Alison’s Cocoa Banana Bread calls for exactly 5 overripe bananas.
This chocolate banana bread turned out more like a dense chocolate banana cake, which I was thrilled about. From my first childhood memories, I requested chocolate cake with banana slices and Cool Whip frosting for my birthday every year. The bread tasted like a more sophisticated version of my childhood birthday cakes. However, I’m not sure Alison intended that.
Past experience tells me that banana bread is dense and moist (I tried to resist that word). This recipe called for ½ cup of cocoa powder, which simultaneously gave this bread a strong, but not overpowering, chocolate flavor AND made the batter more tightly packed and somewhat dry. Perhaps the greater reason it turned out drier than expected is because I used All-Purpose Gluten Free flour instead of regular All-Purpose. My friend Margaret tells me that different flours have various hydration levels, so this could easily have altered the end results.
All this to say, that while the bread was more like a dense cake, it still tasted delicious. My favorite parts were the raw-sugar crust and the sliced banana on top. I’d never tried baking with a raw sugar crust and was delighted by how easy it is to do. Simply grease the inside of a baking pan, sprinkle raw sugar (Demerara or Turbinado) over every side of the pan, and tap out any excess that doesn’t stick. What results is a crunchy sweet exterior in place of what is normally a boring part of banana bread - the sides. This crust meant every bite had something special to offer. And the banana on top, not only did it look fancy, but the sugars in the banana crystallized while baking and the whole thing became slightly gooey, which gave the bread another textural layer.
The prep time was rather minimal, though I did need a stand mixer. You can make this without one, but your poor hands will be exhausted by the end. The suggested oven time is 90-100 minutes. I took mine out at 80 minutes, and next time, I’ll try 70 because perhaps that will make it less dry.
11 recipes cooked, 214 recipes to go.
