Nut-Crusted Chocolate-Banana Swirl Cake

My friend Hanna at Hanaa's Kitchen has been encouraging me to join ABC Bakers for a while. I thought the last thing I needed was another group (true), but this time she caught me at a weak moment. I had a week off from work so I was relaxed and, at the time, had finished Tuesdays with Dorie with no intention of continuing on with the group when they moved to Baking with Julia, nor of finishing the recipes I had missed.

Fast forward and a lot has changed. I've decided to continue on to BwJ, and I'm joining Nancy and a few other baking buddies in making up the recipes I missed in Baking From My Home to Yours. We're starting with the recipes picked in the very beginning and working through we get to the point where we had joined and were baking with the group every week.

But when Hanaa asked me again if I'd like to join ABC (Avid Bakers Challenge), I took a look at the book they would be baking from in 2012 (The Weekend Baker by Abby Dodge) and was very impressed with what I found. Virtually all of the reviews on Amazon are 5 star. It has the weights for the ingredients (yippee!) The recipes are interesting and approachable and are organized by how long they take.

The first recipe the group is making is the nut-crusted chocolate-banana swirl cake. During the winter, it can take a week for a banana to ripen in my cool kitchen, and it did. In fact, I didn't make these with fully brown bananas, but they were spotty. I was running out of time before I left for a conference so I hoped for the best.

I made this one morning in one of my pre-coffee stupors, and I completely forgot to mix in the buttermilk in between additions of flour. By the time I remembered, I had already divided the batter (by eye, instead of my usual obsessive weighing to get exact quantities of the two batters) and started spooning the melted chocolate into one bowl of it. I put half of the buttermilk in each batter. Turns out I had way more chocolate batter than plain so the plain was a little runnier than the chocolate, but it all worked out in the oven. A few things to keep in mind:

• Preheat your oven really well. I used to stick cakes in when it went ding but now I give it an extra 10 minutes, and I believe that gives cakes a little more oven spring.
• One of the things I liked about the recipe is she gives the weight for the bananas peel and all. Another is you don't have to mash the bananas. I dropped banana chunks into the mixer while it was running. A real time saver! 
• I used 70% bittersweet chocolate and added it to probably 2/3, not half of the batter. It gave the finished cake a very pronounced chocolate flavor that people loved.
• After going to the trouble of buttering and nut-and-sugar-coating the pan, I was convinced that it just wasn't worth it and I would skip that step if making the cake again. After tasting - no way. It gives the cake a very special element.
• I used pecans rather than walnuts because we love them and because my buddy Margaret had sent me some (thanks, Margaret!)

Hanaa had said her cake stuck a little bit (find out the beautiful way she remedied that here), but mine popped right out. It looked a little odd because it was predominantly chocolate batter, but my tasters were ecstatic with praise of the finished cake. People who don't normally indulge in the sweets I bring to work were having some because the word in the office was that this one was fantastic. And I have to agree. I'm not a huge fan of baked bananas or banana-flavored things, preferring to peel and eat my bananas. But even I couldn't believe how good this one was - super moist, crunchy on the outside and totally luscious. I'll definitely be making this one again. And again. And again.

If you'd like to see what the other bakers thought of the cake, you can find them here. We're not posting recipes from the book, but you can find the recipe on Fine Cooking.

Chocolate Chip Pecan Banana Bread

As the weather gets warmer, I am often left with spotty bananas as my warmer kitchen makes them ripen faster than we can eat them. Sometimes they get cut up for smoothies, but often they get made into banana bread.

This recipe is adapted from the Flour Bakery recipe. I recently bought the Flour cookbook and I'm discovering the wonderful recipes, which include many of the measurements in grams as well as cups.

This banana bread was delicious. The chocolate played well with the banana, pecans and slight hint of cinnamon. Healthy and delicious don't always go together but this one was a winner. Here's my take on Flour's recipe.

Chocolate Chip Pecan Banana Bread (adapted from Flour Bakery)
Printer-friendly recipe
1 1/2 cups/210 grams all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1 cup plus 2 tablespoons/230 grams sugar
2 eggs
1/2 cup/100 grams canola oil
3 1/2 bananas, very ripe, mashed (about 1 1/3 cups/340 grams)
2 tablespoons creme fraiche or sour cream
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2/3 cup/75 grams pecans, toasted and chopped

3/4 cup/125 grams semisweet chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Spray a 9x5" loaf pan with cooking spray.

Sift together the flour, baking soda, cinnamon and salt. Beat sugar and eggs with the whisk attachment of your mixer on medium speed until light and fluffy, about 5 minutes. Reduce the speed to low and slowly drizzle in the oil. Add the mashed bananas, sour cream, and vanilla. Fold in the flour mixture, pecans and chocolate chips. Pour into the prepared loaf pan and bake for about 1 hour to 1 hour 15 minutes or until it tests done. Cool in the pan on a rack for 10 minutes before turning out on the rack to cool completely (unless you don't mind if your banana bread looks as mangled as mine, which was cut 10 minutes out of the oven.)

Banana + Chocolate Crumb Muffins

A couple of years ago, before I started my blogging and baking journey with Tuesdays with Dorie, I followed baking recipes to the letter. Although baking is chemistry, a certain amount of modification is possible. Two plus years of weekly baking has taught me a lot about what to play with and what to leave alone.

One of the big favorites from the last two years is this banana bundt cake. I recently bought these cute tulip cupcake liners and I wanted to use them. And I had brown bananas. Banana crumb muffins were born.

Revisiting the banana bundt cake recipe from Baking From My Home to Yours, I was shocked to discover it didn't have chocolate chips. I've made it many times, and I could swear the recipe calls for chocolate chips. Well, my version of it does. And because I had the dramatic height of these tulip cupcake liners, I added some crumb topping I had made and frozen a couple of months ago.

These are a little more work than some muffins, but they are so worth it.

Banana + Chocolate Crumb Muffins (adapted from BFMHTY and Ina Garten)
Printer friendly recipe
Crumb topping:
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/3 cup granulated sugar
1/4 cup light brown sugar, lightly packed
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 pound (1 stick) cold unsalted butter, diced

Cake:
3 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 sticks (8 ounces) unsalted butter, at room temperature
2 cups sugar
2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
2 large eggs, preferably at room temperature
About 4 very ripe bananas, mashed (you should have 1 1/2 - 1 3/4 cups)
1 cup sour cream or plain yogurt

1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips

Center a rack in the oven and preheat to 350 degrees F. Place cupcake liners in two muffin tins.

Make the crumb topping: combine the flour, granulated sugar, brown sugar, salt, cinnamon, and the butter crumb topping ingredients in the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a paddle attachment. Mix on low speed until the butter is the size of peas. Rub the mixture with your fingertips until it's in big crumbles, then set aside in the refrigerator, tightly covered, until ready to use.

Whisk the flour, baking soda and salt together.

Working with a stand mixer, preferably fitted with a paddle attachment, or with a hand mixer in a large bowl, beat the butter until creamy. Add the sugar and beat at medium speed until pale and fluffy. Beat in the vanilla, then add the eggs one at a time, beating for about 1 minute after each egg goes in. Reduce the mixer speed to low and mix in the bananas. Finally, mix in half the dry ingredients (don’t be disturbed when the batter curdles), all the sour cream and then the rest of the flour mixture. Stir in the chocolate chips with a spatula. Scoop the batter into the cupcake liners and sprinkle each muffin with 1 tablespoon of the crumb topping. Remaining crumb topping can be frozen, well wrapped, for up to two months.

Bake for 20 minutes, or until a thin knife inserted deep into the center of a muffin comes out clean. Transfer the muffin tins to a rack and cool for 10 minutes before moving the muffins to the rack to cool to room temperature.

Lots of Ways Banana Cupcakes

This week's selection for Tuesdays with Dorie was chosen by Kimberly of Only Creative Opportunities. Lots of Ways Banana Cake is, as the name implies, open to many changes. I know I'll see a lot of variations on the theme of banana cake if I'm able to tear myself away from my spreadsheet du jour and visit my fellow TWD bakers. And to those of you who are still stopping by to see if I'm still alive (yes!), I'm ever so grateful to you for continuing to do so in spite of my seeming neglect of your posts. I read much of what you write while I'm eating my lunch, but I don't comment, thinking I want to wait until "later" to comment when I'll have more time to write something more meaningful than "nice brownie." It's still not "later" so I have yet to write the intended comments. My Google Reader has a life of its own. I could cut it down considerably by marking as read all the Lolcats and The Kitchn posts, but who doesn't need a laugh and a recipe?

My inability to cope with the sheer volume of work and external demands on my time led me to punt with this week's recipe. Dorie suggests we make cake layers and then suggests a few ways to top them. The spectre of taking a cake layer to the office and disappointing three-quarters of my coworkers was added stress I didn't need. And I was confounded by trying to imagine how it would look. So I made cupcakes. I even made sort of healthy cupcakes (no, thank you, I am feeling quite all right). I subbed about 1/3 of the flour with white whole wheat. The recipe yielded 17 regular cupcakes and 24 minis. I followed Dorie's suggestion and made her ganache for the umpteenth time and took it to work with me to frost the cupcakes after they cooled. My coworkers streamed in and out of the break room, oohing and ahhing when they spied cupcakes topped with chocolate for breakfast. And since not everyone likes chocolate, I left some bare. I grabbed one (with ganache, naturally) to enjoy as my afternoon snack. As the day played out, I emailed with my coworker who was ripped out of her position and stuck in another one, not in my department, as a result of the layoffs we had. She's miserable, and I met her while she took her break. The banana cupcake, while not a solution to her problems, did bring a smile to her face. And isn't putting a smile on a crying face so much better than eating a cupcake?

These were lovely, fluffy cupcakes, delicious with their undertone of coconut. I heard that the ganache + banana was a winning combination. They're a definite repeat.

Thanks, Kimberly, for choosing such a versatile and easy recipe. If you'd like the recipe, Kimberly has it for you here.

TWD - Cocoa-Nana Bread

This week's Tuesdays with Dorie recipe is Cocoa-Nana Bread, chosen by Steph at Obsessed with Baking. I love Steph's blog, and she's such a fabulous baker. It's fascinating to me why people pick their recipes. It's a window into their personalities. I have over a year before I get to pick but I'm sure you'll learn something about me when that happens. I can't wait to read Steph's post and learn what about it spoke to her.

I love chocolate, and one of my coworkers' favorite Dorie recipes has been the banana bundt cake. This cake is the opposite of that one. The bundt cake smacked you with its banana-ness, and this one knocks you over with its chocolatey-ness. It was easy to put together, and it smelled amazing while it was baking (I imagine it made my Twitter buddy Kayte a little nauseous...she can't take chocolate). I used half white whole wheat flour, and there was no way you could tell with all that chocolate!

This recipe was a huge hit with my coworkers, one of whom declared it the best dessert he had ever had. I thought it was very good, but the small bits of banana distracted me from the simply incomparable chocolate flavor. I want to make this one again, but with less or no banana, because I want to enjoy the deep chocolate flavor without the distraction of the banana. I know, I know, I have a problem with chocolate.

Pop over to Steph's for the recipe, and check out what the other TWD bakers thought. You can find all 300+ of them here.

TWD - Classic Banana Bundt Cake

I am living proof that sometimes, learning does not occur.

I looked at the title of this week's Tuesdays with Dorie recipe, I thought "how dull." I mean, I've made hundreds of banana breads, cakes, muffins, cupcakes, smoothies, etc. What did I really need with yet another recipe that starts with mashed extra ripe bananas?

Well, those other banana recipes weren't Dorie's recipes. You would think I would have learned by now that Dorie's recipes are in a class by themselves.

I have a banana bread recipe I have made since woolly mammoths roamed the earth. It's moist, easy and made entirely in the food processor. I've never shared it with you, although I have meant to.

Sharing it is now unnecessary.

Say hello to Dorie's banana bundt cake. It may be the only banana recipe you ever need.


In the interest of fair disclosure, I have to admit I added a cup of semi-sweet chocolate chips, and I topped it with Dorie's chocolate glaze. For some unknown reason (operator error? serendipity?), the "glaze" didn't glaze at all. It became semi firm, and I was distraught that I had done that to my lovely cake. I brought it in to work, wrote a note of apology for the Glaze That Didn't, and went on with my morning.


And then the accolades started rolling in. People were wowed by the cake. They loved the chewy nature of the Glaze That Didn't. They told me not to change a thing next time. I hadn't tasted it yet, so I grabbed a taste thinking they were being kind.

It was fantastic, and I agree completely that the chewy Glaze That Didn't was perfect the way it was. For as many times as I've made banana bread, I'm very ambivalent about it. I like my bananas eaten as a piece of fruit. But this cake changed all that.

Mary of The Food Librarian picked this week's recipe, and she scored big points here. She'll have the recipe posted, but be sure to spend some time on her blog. I LOVE her photography and I think you will, too.