After a stressful week filled with many deadlines, revisions and spreadsheets -- and, the start of a cold -- my weekend was very quiet -- and that was a very good thing indeed.
Most of it was spent in my pajamas sitting at my sewing machine, loading/unloading the washer or dryer as the case my be -- cooking a large batch of chili -- baking a loaf of quick bread --
O' I almost forgot to mention that I had a intimate relationship with boxes of tissue, cough syrup and saline nasal spray (I know, I know -- too much information for a Monday morning!).
Now to the baking part of the weekend ---
Chocolate Banana Bread
1/2 C walnuts or pecans, toasted and coarsely chopped
1-3/4 C all purpose flour
1/4 C Dutch-processed cocoa powder
1 C granulated sugar
1 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
2 large eggs, lightly beaten
1/2 C unsalted butter, melted and cooled
3 ripe bananas, mashed (approx 1-1/2 cups)
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 cup chocolate chips
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Spray loaf pan (9x5x3 inch) with baking spray or grease and flour, which ever you like.
- In a large bowl mix together the flour, cocoa powder, sugar, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Set aside.
- In a medium bowl, combine the mashed bananas, eggs, melted butter, and vanilla. Gently fold wet ingredients into dry ingredients, just until blended. Add chocolate chips and nuts.
- Scrape batter into prepared pan and bake until bread has risen and toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean, approx 55-65 minutes. Place on rack to cool for 10 minutes, remove from pan and cool completely on rack.
Notes on this bread:
Needs more chocolate -- seriously, if I'm going to take the time to make something that has 'chocolate' in the title -- it should taste like chocolate. Don't get me wrong, this is a decent quick bread, but needs some tweaking before it can be added to my 'favorites list'. I will definitely make this again, but add some melted baking chocolate (2 oz ??) to the batter, use brown sugar instead of white sugar, and also use two different kinds of chips (white chocolate and semi-sweet). Then, I think, it would be chocolatey enough for me !
More tomorrow on the sewing part of the weekend.
