Chocolate Cinnamon Banana Bread

I’m going away for a long weekend – just a drive to wine country and it’ll be awesome. I wanted to bring something to have for breakfast if I didn’t feel like going to a coffee shop or diner. Then I was making it and I thought – you know, this would be even better with chocolate.

And it is.

Not sure if it’s still breakfast, but it’s got bananas in it, so I’m going with yes.

Difficulty: easy
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Ingredients

Cake

1 ½ cups flour
1 T baking powder
1 T cinnamon
1 t salt
3 large, ripe bananas
1/3 cup vegetable oil
2 eggs
1 cup maple syrup
1 T + 1 t vanilla
1 ½ cups semisweet chocolate chips

Crunch Topping

½ cup sugar
4 T cinnamon
1 t vanilla
1/3 cup semisweet chocolate chips

Directions

Butter and flour or spray a loaf pan and set it aside.

In a medium bowl, whisk together your dry ingredients – the flour, baking powder, cinnamon and salt. Set this aside for just a sec.

In a large bowl add the bananas, oil, eggs, maple syrup and vanilla. Mix this until well combined, though it’s ok if there are still small chunks of banana in there.

Grab your dry ingredients and mix them with your wet ones, about a third at a time (add in one third, mix. Next add in the second third, mix. Etc.) Don’t overmix – just mix each step until you can’t see any of the dry ingredients anymore.

Pour in your chocolate chips and stir them into the batter until they’re evenly distributed.

Pour the batter into your prepared loaf pan.

Now we’ll make the crunch topping.

In a small bowl add the sugar, cinnamon and vanilla. Mix with a fork and sprinkle over the top of the batter. Take the fork and stir it in just a bit – only go about a half inch down, just so you don’t have just a pile of cinnamon sugar on top. Then get the remaining 1/3 cup chips and sprinkle them on as well.

Bake at 350 for about 40 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out dry. Move the pan to a wire rack to cool completely, then slice up and serve!