Dark Chocolate Marbled Peanut Butter Banana Bread

While shopping the endlessly fascinating aisles of Danforth Variety & Fruit Market Raul picked up a huge bunch of over-ripe bananas for a mere 39 cents a pound. Banana bread is in the offing. He googles and browses until he finds the most intriguing and sensible recipe in existence. The aforementioned recipe resides at What's Baking in the Barbershop? a very entertaining yet practical blog out of Boston. The recipe is modified from recipes found at Cooking Light so R&D feel safe in reproducing it here.

Ingredients:

-2 cups all-purpose flour

-3/4 tsp. baking soda

-1/2 tsp. salt

-1 and 1/2 cups mashed, ripe banana (about 3 medium to large bananas)

-1/3 cup low-fat vanilla yogurt

-1/3 cup creamy peanut butter

-3 Tbsp. melted butter, cooled

-2 eggs (or 1/2 cup egg substitute)

-1/2 cup sugar

-1/2 cup light brown sugar

-1/2 cup dark chocolate chips

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Combine the flour, baking soda, and salt; set aside. In a large mixing bowl, combine the banana, yogurt, peanut butter, cooled melted butter, and eggs. Mix well until combined. Add both sugars, and continue to mix well. Next, add the flour mixture a little bit at a time and beat on low speed until just moist and combined.


Place the chocolate chips in a medium-sized microwave safe bowl, and microwave on high in 30-second increments, stirring after each time. Continue until the chips are completely melted and smooth; cool slightly. Add 1 cup of the banana bread batter to the melted chocolate, and stir until well combined.

Coat a 9 x 5 inch (or 8.5 x 4.5) loaf pan with cooking spray. Swirl the plain batter and chocolate batter together with a knife in the pan (see the stages of this process below). Bake at 350 for 1 hour to 1 hour and 15 minutes, or until a knife or toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean. Let cool in the pan for 10 to 15 minutes before removing from pan to cool completely on a cooling rack.

Of course the loaves are not allowed to cool for half an hour before tasting. The bread is delicious but the peanut butter/banana section has an odd texture - like a very firm pudding. Raul is devastated. "We should have waited to cut it," he wails. "And where did that faint taste of mint come from? This is way too heavy for the height - it fell. Maybe it was using crunchy peanut butter. Or the yogurt. Or maybe it needed to cook longer. Or . . ."

"Or maybe it's just delicious and don't worry about it," says Drew while he cuts himself a second slice.  

"I'll figure it out and get it perfect," vows Raul. "Or maybe someone will read this and have a solution. As God as my witness we will have perfect dark chocolate peanut butter banana bread."