Peanut Butter Chocolate Banana Bread

If you take a look through my recipe archive, you’ll notice that I tend to favour certain ingredients more than others. Besides fruit, some of my most common baking ingredients are chocolate, espresso and peanut butter. Baking with chocolate is obvious because chocolate anything is delicious. If chocolate is the main ingredient, I’ll add a quick dash of espresso to enhance the delicious chocolatey flavour. Peanut butter is a common baking staple because we always have some in our kitchen and Trevor is a fan of anything I make with peanut butter. Plus peanut butter and chocolate together rocks.

Speaking of peanut butter and chocolate, I’d been meaning to make this recipe for a while now, but until recently I was so convinced that I had already posted a peanut butter chocolate banana bread recipe. Does this happen to anyone else? A couple months ago, I had planned on making white chocolate cranberry cookies only to realize that I had already posted a recipe back in 2011. Since then, whenever I have a recipe in mind, I panic and search my archives to make sure I’m not accidentally repeating myself.

If you were to take another look in my recipe archive, you would also notice that my bread to muffins ratio is pretty sad. This alone is proof that I am 4x more likely to make muffins than bread and I have the following reasons to back me up on that:

1. Muffins are wonderful, portable snack. Slices of bread, not so much. Have you ever tried to eat a slice of banana bread while you are running out the door to work? I have and it wasn’t pretty.
2. Muffins take less time to bake than a loaf of bread. In the time that a loaf of bread is finally ready to come out of the oven, I could already be eating my third muffin.
3. Muffins are so much more photogenic than slices of bread. You can stack muffins, cut them in half, line them up, put them in a basket, the possibilities are endless. Bread, not so much. In fact, trying to make bread slices look pretty and interesting is something I struggle with on a regular basis.
4. And lastly, muffins don’t need to be sliced. I am the worst at slicing bread and crumbs end up everywhere. Muffins tend to be less of a mess in the long run.

So why did I make bread instead of muffins? Well, it was mostly to challenge myself. Maybe someday I’ll figure out how to stage and take photos of bread in a way that doesn’t make me want to pull out my hair. Someday I would like to learn how to slice bread properly without completely destroying it, I’ll never get better unless I keep doing it. So rather than take the easy way out and make muffins, I fought my natural urges, poured the batter into my barely used loaf pan and popped it into the waiting oven.

What I love the most about this recipe is that besides making a pretty awesome loaf of bread is that around all the chocolate and bananas, you can still taste the peanut butter. So many times, peanut butter can get lost in baking and I always worry about adding too much and off-setting the delicate balance of ingredients. I had a little extra strawberry compote leftover from pie day (March 14th) that was a nice added touch, but any kind of jam will do just fine.

And if you’re not feeling the whole banana bread thing, this recipe can be made into a dozen muffins. In case you favour that whole grab-and-go, no slicing, reduced baking time thing.

Print

Yield: 1 loaf

Peanut Butter Chocolate Banana Bread

Prep Time: 20 minutes

Cook Time: 45 minutes to 1 hour

Total Time: 1 hour 20 minutes

Ingredients:

• 1 cup whole wheat pastry flour
• 2 tbsp cocoa powder
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp baking powder
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 2 ripe bananas, mashed
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1/4 cup crunchy peanut butter
• 1 large egg
• 1/4 cup melted coconut oil
• 1 tsp vanilla extract

Optional

• 1/2 cup chocolate chips

Directions:

1. Preheat your oven to 350*F. Line your loaf pan with parchment paper or spray with a non-stick cooking spray.
2. In a small bowl, whisk together whole wheat pastry flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, cinnamon, baking powder and salt. Set aside.
3. In a separate large bowl, mash bananas and stir in brown sugar, crunchy peanut butter and egg. Add coconut oil and vanilla extract. Add dry ingredients bowl to wet ingredients bowl and stir until just combined. Gently fold in chocolate chips, if using.
4. Pour batter into a greased loaf pan and bake for 45 minutes to 1 hour until an inserted toothpick comes out mostly clean. Cool in loaf pan and then remove and cool completely on a wired rack.

Recipe adapted from The Novice Chef