Chocolate Banana Walnut Loaf

Quite many of you have been asking for this recipe for a very long time.  Very frankly I am very lazy to update my blog. I would rather just click pictures and learn is the tendency these days. Just some mundane every day activities take up most of my time these days. I have shifted my focus to yoga, running, fitness, health and mental well being. Rest are sure to follow only if these are in place right.


I baked this loaf cake for my son before the New Years because he just did not want to eat the plum cake. Yeah right my son of 5 years has his own opinion when it comes to bakes and food. And he would not budge much from his preferences. He had kept asking me to bake this right from the start of December for it was his birthday too.  But then I had already made up my mind for Eggless Blackforest Cake and I was adamant not to change it.


Coming to this cake , I have used Whole Wheat ,Jaggery, Butter, Oil and an Egg. Most of the recipes call for oil in Banana Cake and rightly so. But I wanted to experiment and so the cake has both oil and butter. Also I do not bake eggless for the family. We are a meat eating family and unless otherwise mentioned all the recipes here would have egg.

Ingredients	Quantity
Whole Wheat Flour	1 cup
Cocoa Powder	1/2 cup
Baking Powder	2 tsp
Salt	pinch
Mashed Bananas	1.5 cups
Eggs - Room Temperature	1
Unsalted Butter	1/4 cup
Oil	1/4 cup
Powdered Jaggery	3/4 cup
Vanilla Extract	1 tsp
Chocolate Chips	1/2 cup
Walnuts Chopped	1/2 cup

My way of making
1) Preheat oven to 180C
2) Prepare a 9-by-5-inch loaf pan with butter and flour and a parchment paper.
3) In a  bowl combine flour, cocoa powder, baking powder and  salt. Whisk or sift to combine and set aside
4) In another bowl, mash the ripe bananas with a fork until no large chucks are left. Add the cooled melted butter, oil, vanilla and eggs. Stir until fully combined. Add in brown sugar until smooth.
Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients, and gently fold in with a spatula. Do not over mix
Stir in 3/4 cup of the chocolate chips and the chopped walnuts.
5) Transfer batter into the prepared pan and sprinkle the remaining 1/4 cup of chocolate chips on top of the bread.
6) Bake for 50-60 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center of the bread comes out clean.
7) Once fully baked, remove the pan from the oven and let it set on a cooling rack. Let the loaf  cool in the pan for 15 minutes. Run a knife around the edges of the bread and gently remove from the pan onto the wire cooling rack and let cool 
8) Cut into slices and relish. Enjoy!

Some of the bakes from earlier days one with chocolate and the other without

Notes
1) Use good quality chocolate and cocoa powder as the taste of this loaf is dominated by them.
2) Use ripe bananas as they help in retaining moisture. 
3) Oil can be any non pungent ones.
4) You can increases the sugar/jaggery up to 1 cup but 3/4 was right for us.
5) Start checking on the bread at the 50 minute mark. If needed check every 5 minutes and decide on the baking time. Do the toothpick test each time.