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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Toasted Sugar Chocolate Chip Cookies with Cinnamon and Espresso Powder

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I had a hard time naming this one anything catchy, because really it is just the classic Tollhouse chocolate chip cookie with some tweaks and twists. The more baking posts I do, the more you'll probably notice that I love cinnamon, I add it to most of my baked goods.

So in this recipe, we have a couple things going on. The Tollhouse chocolate chip cookie recipe is not only purportedly the original chocolate chip cookie recipe, but it also so good, it's a good base for experimenting, as it pretty much always comes out a winner with no tweaks. I love cinnamon, so adding a touch into the cookie dough here doesn't give the cookie an overwhelming cinnamon taste, but tasting the cookie gives you a hint that something else is going on. Likewise, the espresso powder adds a nice "mocha" hint to the cookie. Neither overpower the original taste but add subtle complexity to the standard flavor base. Toasted Sugar works very similarly. It's a technique developed over at Serious Eats that I have been experimenting with. Toasting the sugar, in this case baking it in an oven safe metal pan before use, gives the sugar a less sweet and more caramel-y note to the cookie. If you do attempt Toasted Sugar, I do advise you to be careful, because the first time I attempted it I was dumb and touched the metal handle after it came out of the oven, burnt my hand in several spots and dumped two cups of sugar onto the floor and had to start over. If you do attempt it though, it's a very delicious and easy substitute for regular sugar to give a more complex flavor without much extra work.

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Toasting Sugar

Like I said up top, this comes from Serious Eats. I put two cups of sugar into an oven safe metal pan, into a 350 degree oven and let it sit for about 25-30 minutes and then took it out and poured it into a container and let it cool completely before covering. The sugar will be a slightly tan color that is a little hard to discern while looking at it, but comparing it to the original sugar you used will show it looks pretty different. Once it's completely cooled, you can use it in place of normal sugar without any substitutions.

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Dry Ingredients

2 1/4th Cups Flour
1 tsp. Baking Soda
1 tsp. Salt
1/4 tsp. Cinnamon Powder
1/4 tsp. Espresso Powder
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Wet Ingredients

1 Cup (2 sticks) Softened Butter
3/4th Cup Packed Brown Sugar
3/4th Cup Toasted Sugar
1 tsp. Vanilla Extract
2 Eggs (Room Temp)
2 Cups Semi-Sweet Chocolate Chips

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Directions

1. Combine your dry ingredients together in a small bowl.
2. Place Butter, Brown Sugar, Toasted Sugar and Vanilla Extract into Mixing Bowl and mix on low to cream butter and sugars together.
3. Once combined, add Eggs one at a time into mixing bowl, only adding the second one once the first one is fully combined in. 

4. Once the second egg is fully combined, slowly add in flour mixture until it is fully mixed in.
5. Once all the flour mixture is incorporated, add Chocolate Chips
6. Make sure any loose flour is mixed in and chocolate chips have been thoroughly incorporated, then set the entire mixing bowl in the refrigerator for 1 hour.. This helps to stop cookies from spreading in oven.

7. After 1 hour, take dough out of the fridge and preheat oven to 375 degrees. By the time the oven is ready, the dough should be soft enough to scoop.
8. Drop cookies by rounded tablespoon onto an ungreased baking sheet.
9. Bake for 9-11 minutes
10.Let cool for about 5 minutes on baking sheet, then remove to wire rack to cool completely