Chocolate Chip Banana Bread

If you buy bananas and don’t like throwing away food, then you need to learn how to make banana bread. Bananas can go from green and hard to black and mushy in the blink of an eye so no matter how many bananas you eat you will always end up with some overripe bananas in the back of your cupboard at which point you will have to ask yourself if you are the type of person who wastes food and fills up garbage dumps or if you are a person who makes banana bread.

Fortunately, banana bread is much quicker and easier to make than regular bread and you don’t need any mixing equipment, just a few bowls, a spoon, and a fork. You don’t even need overripe bananas; anything that is fully ripened will do. The only way you can mess it up is if you don’t properly oil the pan or don’t use enough chocolate chips.

Tools:

  • Two mixing bowls
  • Wooden spoon
  • Fork
  • Whisk

Ingredients:

  • 3 ripe or overripe bananas
  • 2 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1 tablespoon coffee cream (use heavy cream if you have it, but no need to buy a carton for a recipe that only needs one tsp)
  • 2 eggs
  • ¼ tsp vanilla extract
  • 1 cup brown sugar
  • Couple dashes of nutmeg
  • ½ cup softened butter
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 1 tsp baking powder
  • 1 tsp baking soda
  • 1 cup chocolate chips (get the smaller ones if you can find them)

Directions:

Whisk together the flour, baking powder, and baking soda in a bowl and set aside. Combine the butter and sugar in a mixing bowl and cream together with a spatula. As long as the butter is nice and soft there won’t be any need for a mixture as it should only take you a minute or so of mushing with the spatula for the sugar and butter to be fully combined with no chunks of butter or sugar. Once the butter and sugar have been combined, mash in the bananas with a fork and then whisk in the eggs, vanilla, nutmeg, cream, and salt. Many recipes will tell you to whisk the salt with the dry ingredients, but if you want the salt to be evenly dispersed it makes much more sense to dissolve it in the wet ingredients. Once everything is combined in a mushy looking mixture dump in the dry ingredients along with the chocolate chips and stir until there no dry bits of flour. Lightly coat a non-stick baking pan with olive oil and dump in the mixture. Bake in a pre-heated, 325 degree oven for an hour and ten minutes. Allow to cool on a rack for 10 to 15 minutes before serving.