The key to really good banana bread is the amount of chocolate morsels you drop into the batter before sticking it in the oven. There are plenty of recipes out there that include substitutions to cut calories, like oil for butter, or applesauce for oil, and you can always lower the amount of sugar added. But when I eat banana bread, I like it to be basically banana-flavored chocolate bread.
This bread tastes best when eaten warm from the oven while in bed, book or Netflix show optional. One of my favorite things about being a very single adult is that I can eat whatever I want in bed at any time of the day, and I’m the only one who needs to guess what kind of crumb is stuck to my cheek the next morning. Pita chip, or time to wash my sheets? Only I have to decide.
Ingredients:
- ¾ cup sugar (negotiable)
- ¼ cup plant-based oil (safflower, sunflower, etc.)
- 1 egg
- 3 medium-sized ripe bananas
- ¼ cup milk
- 1 tsp. freshly squeezed lemon
- 1¼ tsp. vanilla extract
- 1¼ cup flour
- ½ tsp. baking soda
- ½ tsp. salt
- ½ bag of dark-chocolate morsels
Instructions:
For the prep, mix all the dry ingredients together in one bowl. Cream the sugar, oil, milk, vanilla extract, lemon and egg in a separate bowl. Mash your bananas, and add it to the wet mixture. Combine the dry and wet ingredients, and stir together well. Then add the chocolate morsels. Like, as much chocolate as you want. I used half a bag of dark chocolate, but no judgment here if you want to go full-bag. Grease a bread pan, and pour the mixture in. Bake at 350 degrees for one hour, or the amount of time it takes to get the “no one new around you” message on Tinder and decide you don’t ever want to be naked in front of anyone ever again anyways, or when a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.
Kelly Andrews is a poet who plans to stick around Pittsburgh indefinitely. You can find more sad, healthy (and funny) meals on her blog sadhealthymeals.wordpress.com.
