I think the problem of bananas going bad before you can finish them must be an age-old conundrum. No matter how many people in the house commit themselves to “helping to finish the bunch”, you inevitably have a couple stragglers that go from a delightful yellow to a spotted black mess, seemingly overnight. Clearly, this is a conspiracy.

If you feel like throwing yourself on that hand grenade, you can always just eat a slightly-softer-than-preferred piece of fruit. If it occurs to you, you can put them in the freezer for later use, where they’ll surely be forgotten until the next time you clean it out and you say to yourself “Ugh, what moron put these in here?”

OR, if you’re really on your game, you can pull out all the necessary ingredients from your cupboards to make a wicked batch of banana bread. Or even better, chocolate banana bread.

(Of course if I’d been really really on my game I’d have made double-chocolate banana bread by throwing in some chocolate chips. You can’t win them all, y’all).

So this is what I did recently with my sadly wasting away bananas. I’d normally just do a batch of banana bread all on its lonesome, but I wanted to jazz it up a bit: chocolate it became!

Banana bread is actually a wonderfully versatile dessert. You can add anything to it to give it a little extra pizzazz, to make it taste a little different, or you can keep it plain-jane; either way it always ends up being moist, sweet and delicious. If you do it right, you can even make it relatively healthy! …But we’ll save that for another post.

For now, just enjoy some simple, chocolatey banana bread – don’t let your bananas go to waste!

Chocolate Banana Bread

Makes 1 loaf
Slightly adapted from ItsAlwaysAutumn.com
Ingredients:

• 2-3 medium bananas, mashed
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1/3 cup vegetable oil
• 1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
• 1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 cup chocolate chips (optional: for double-chocolate bread!)

Instructions:

1. Preheat the oven to 350F.
2. Line a standard bread pan with parchment paper, or grease with butter, or Baking PAM
3. In a large bowl, beat together eggs, sugar, and oil.
4. Mix in the mashed banana and vanilla.
5. Add flour, cocoa, baking soda, and salt. Mix until just combined
6. Bake for 1 hour, or until a knife inserted in the middle comes out clean
7. CONSUME!!! (careful it’s hot, obviously)