Mexican Chocolate and Toasted Sugar Banana Bread

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This is a twist on a family banana bread recipe. I only needed 3/4ths of a cup of sugar for the chocolate chip cookies so I used some of my leftover Toasted Sugar for this banana bread recipe to add an extra caramel-y note. Much like chocolate chip cookies, banana bread is so good, easy and mellow on it's own that it is rife with opportunities to make little twists and turns to make it your own. This will probably not be the only banana bread recipe I post either. Bananas are both cheap and easy to forget about until they're too brown to eat, so it's a perfect match for turning something lost into something gained. Mexican chocolate, for those unaware, is a flavor profile that's very much up my alley. Commercially it's sold primarily as round discs from brands like Abuelita and Ibarra, and is spiced with cinnamon and intended to be melted into milk to make a hot cocoa. It's a lot more grainy than your average chocolate bar, so instead of chunks you get mostly shavings and powder from chopping it up, giving this loaf a continuous but not overpowering taste of chocolate and cinnamon.

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Ingredients

1/2 Cup Melted Butter
1/2 Cup Buttermilk
2 Room Temp Eggs
1 Cup Toasted Sugar
1 tsp. Baking Soda

1/4th tsp. Kosher Salt
2 Cups flour
3 Very Ripe Bananas (as close to black as you can get without being moldy)
1 Disc Mexican Chocolate Shaved


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Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F
2. Whisk Butter and Sugar in a fairly large bowl until thoroughly mixed together
3. Add eggs one at a time into mixture, making sure they are fully combined before continuing
4. Add buttermilk to batter
5. Add Baking Soda, Salt and Flour, being sure to slowly whisk flour in so that everything is fully combined without overpowering the batter with flour
6. Add Bananas and Chocolate shavings. Banana will be lumpy, but should be soft enough that a good couple hits with the whisk fully integrates them into batter
7. Pour into well-greased loaf pans. (should make two loaves with a standard 1.5 qt loaf pan. I use one large 3-ish qt. pan.)
8. Bake for around 45 minutes until toothpick comes out clean in center.
9. Take out of oven, set whole loaf pan on wire rack to cool and run a butter knife around the edges to make sure it comes out easy.
10. After cooling for about 30 minutes to an hour in the loaf pan, turn out and leave to cool completely on wire rack, then cover and store.

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What I Could/Would Do Differently

Like I said up top, this is a pretty versatile recipe base for banana bread if you just take out the Mexican chocolate. Adding in a cup of toasted and finely chopped walnuts or a cup of semi-sweet chocolate chips are both easy and fun variations.

If you do not have Buttermilk, you can do what my family's original banana bread recipe says to do and make "sour milk" by combining 1/2 cup whole or 2% milk with 1 Tbsp. of Distilled White Vinegar and leave that mixture sitting for 5 minutes before use. Not exactly the same, but it gets the job done.

I have a large 3-ish quart loaf pan and only one 1.5 quart standard size loaf pan, so I tend to make one large banana bread loaf instead. If you also want to do this, follow the recipe until you get to 45 minutes in the oven, at that point open it, cover the loaf pan with foil so it won't get any darker while still cooking, and let cook for around 20 more minutes, or until it passes the toothpick test.

While banana bread is good on day one, bananas share this magical property with pumpkin where it tastes more like itself in the days following the initial bake. So it can be very difficult, but I highly recommend waiting a day or even two to eat the banana bread, as you get so much more of the banana flavor on the second and third days. I often won't even cut my banana bread open until it has sat for a day.

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