Banana Choco-chips Bread

Bananas over ripening on the kitchen counter, no one even touches it once the peel has started blackening. And that includes me as well! Most of the time if it is just one or two, it is promptly fed to the cows that come grazing around. Don’t be surprised, we live in outskirts of Bangalore and still there are cows that are left to graze around which do come close to home for such ripe bananas or other vegetable peels or so that my MIL feed them.

But this time around, I was waiting for over ripe bananas, so that I could make quick bread out of it in my new loaf pans that I got as gift from mom. Had quite a few of them and made this lovely bread out of it. This was again baked in the late evening after work on a week day. That shows again how it is not all that difficult to bake even with a fully tight schedule! I’m glad I’ve started baking!!

Now a days, whenever I take up some after-work project like this, niece Hima is ever-ready to ‘help’ me out. Help as in taking out the items that I need from the fridge, patiently waiting till I measure out the ingredients and ask her to sieve the flours, then trying to lick her finger for the taste of sugar and exclaiming it is good, then me asking her to wash her hands and come before she continues in the kitchen and then mixing the final batter/dough too.

Then she stands in front of the oven reading the count down timer aloud, a revision of backward counting she is taught at school! And she even knows that I need to insert a knife into the baked goodie to do the toothpick test. She is so impatient to wait till the timer hits zero! And finally when the oven beeps, she wants her share of the goodie for taste-testing immediately, not even allowing it to cool!

Of course she instructs me and her grand mother to keep a piece of it in her snack box for school the next day!

Okay, back to the recipe, it is an easy to make, half whole wheat flour recipe. Makes a good snack bread, or even for breakfast. We all loved it and I’m planning to make it again this week.

Banana Bread

Recipe Source: Champa’s Versatile Kitchen

Ingredients:
Whole Wheat flour - 1 cup
All purpose flour - 1 1/2 cup
Sugar - 1 cup (Can use brown sugar; Add 2 Tbsp more for a sweeter bread)
Baking Powder - 1 ½ tsp
Baking soda - 1 tsp
Salt - ¼ tsp
Vegetable Oil - 1/3 cup
Banana - mashed and measured 2 cups (about 4 large ripe ones)
Vanilla - 2 tsp
Flax seed powder - 2 Tbsp mixed in 6Tbsp warm water
Choco chips - 1/3 cup (use more if you like)


Method:

• In a bowl, whisk together flours, salt, baking soda, baking powder, sugar. Set aside.
• Preheat the oven to 180 C or 350 F (170 deg C or 325 F if using darker or glass pan).
• Grease and dust a 9 X 5 loaf pan with vegetable oil and set aside. I used two smaller loaf pans - greased and dusted one and lined the other with parchment paper to see the difference :)
• In another bowl, take the flax meal, warm water mixture. Add oil, mashed bananas, vanilla. Whisk again.
• Slowly add the dry ingredients to wet and stir until just moist and no streaks of flour is seen.
• Dust the choco chips with a little flour and mix in. Do not over mix.
• Pour into the prepared pan. Bake for 55 - 60 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.
• After 45 minutes, take out the pan from the oven, loosely tent with aluminum foil and then continue to bake to prevent over browning. - I didn’t do this; my greased loaf was done at 57 min and the one with parchment was done at 60 min
• Let it cool on wire rack for 10 minutes in the pan and then out of pan till it is completely cool. Slice only after it is cool.

• I, D and our little niece Hima didn’t have any patience to wait that long, so we made ugly slices off one of the loaves and happily gorged upon it! I even got out of the bed in the night and came to the kitchen to have another bite!!!
• And the other one sliced beautifully when cut on the next day, but of course I didn’t do a good job in making even sized slices.

Notes:
• Original recipe was with eggs and I made it eggless using flax meal as suggested by Champa; also added choco chips, which we loved.
• 1/3 cup of choco chips was just enough for us; if you want it more chocolatey, you can add more
• Can add about half a cup of toasted walnuts or even raisins
• I used 1 and ¼ cups of sugar which was a little too sweet; so next time I’ll use 1cup + 1 Tbsp