My husband Ben and I love this Banana Bread! It’s so moist. I used to buy a bunch of Bananas regularly, expecting Ben to bring a banana or two into work as a healthy breakfast or snack. It turns out that he would deliberately leave all the bananas until they start to go brown, and tell me that it’s time for Banana Bread! Nowadays I just buy bananas for the purpose of Banana Bread. We do have a divide here. I’m a purist and love the Banana Bread as is. Ben is an extreme chocolate lover and believes there is no such thing as too much chocolate in anything. So we always need to make two loaves – We make a double-batch of the batter and I make mine pure, and Ben mixes in a whole bag or bar of chocolate chunks into the other half of the batter! Which would be your preference?
Banana Bread
Ingredients
- 1/2 cup unsalted butter softened, plus some extra for greasing pan
- 3/4 cup brown sugar lightly packed
- 2 eggs beaten
- 2 1/3 cups overripe bananas mashed (approx. 2 large bananas per cup)
- 2 cups all-purpose flour
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
- 10 ounces chocolate chips optional
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.
- Lightly grease a 9×5 inch loaf pan with soft butter.
- In a large bowl, use a hand mixer to mix together the butter, brown sugar, eggs and mashed banana until well blended.
- In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, and salt.
- Pour the flour mixture into the banana mixture and use a hand mixer to mix until just blended.
- Stir in the chocolate chips if using. Otherwise pour the batter into the prepared loaf pan.
- Bake for 60-65 minutes in the preheated oven (23 minutes for the mini loaves, 11 minutes for mini muffins). Loaf is done when a long toothpick inserted in the center of the loaf comes out clean. For a chocolate chip banana loaf you may see melted chocolate on the toothpick which is fine, but you should not see banana batter.
- Cool for 10 mins, then take the loaf out of the pan.