This past Tuesday, November 17^th, was National Homemade Bread Day. To celebrate, I baked my boyfriend’s mom’s recipe for banana chocolate chip bread. I considered baking a loaf of regular bread this week, but since I’ve done dessert recipes every other week I thought this week should be a sweet treat too. You can make loaves of bread or muffins from this recipe, but I chose to do loaves this time. Disclaimer: to make this bread, an arm workout will be required, so make sure you don’t plan to bake this bread on arm day. 😉

The first step to making this delicious bread is to mash up the bananas. You will need 2 cups of mashed bananas. I used 5 medium-sized bananas this time, but depending on the bananas you get that number could change. To mash the bananas, use a fork and do it by hand in a large bowl (this is the arm workout I mentioned before). When you’ve got 2 cups mashed, stir 1 cup of sour cream into the bananas and set aside for later use. The mixture should be pretty runny (see left).

The next step is to cream together 1 stick of softened butter and 2 cups of sugar. Mix these until you get a smooth mixture, then add 4 eggs and 1 teaspoon of vanilla, and continue mixing on a medium-low speed while you prepare the dry ingredients. For the dry ingredients, in a separate bowl, stir together 3 cups of flour, 2 and 1/4 teaspoons of baking soda, and 1/4 teaspoon of salt.

When the eggs and vanilla are mixed in, slowly add in the dry ingredients and keep mixing on a medium-low speed until all of the dry ingredients are in. Then, turn up the mixer to a higher speed and beat until the batter is evenly mixed and somewhat stiff (see right). Next, add in the banana and sour cream mixture and stir until it is all incorporated. The last step is to gently fold in the chocolate chips. I use 1 and 1/2 cups of chocolate chips, but you can use however much you prefer. 🙂

Now you are ready to bake your bread! To keep the bread from sticking to the pans, you’ll want to line each pan with parchment paper. If you cut the paper into strips to fit the size of your pan, you can stack them in the pan (see left) and this makes for very easy removal of the baked loaf. Also, if you spray your pan with cooking spray first, the parchment paper will stay in place better.

When pouring the batter, you should only fill each pan about 1/2-3/4 full, so that the bread has room to rise in the oven. Bake the loaves for 10 minutes at 375 degrees Fahrenheit, then turn the oven temperature down to 325 degrees Fahrenheit and continue baking for 30-40 minutes. The loaves are ready when the edges are golden brown (see right) and a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out mostly clean. I used somewhat shallow loaf pans this time, so my loaves only baked for 40 minutes total. This recipe usually yields 3-4 loaves for me.

This recipe is a bit time-consuming, and not the easiest recipe ever (I think mashing the bananas is the toughest part), but the work it requires is worth it because this bread is delicious. It’s moist, sweet, chocolaty, and not super dense (so you can eat a lot of it at once)! I hope some of you will try this recipe out for yourselves. Thanks for reading!