I’m feeling a little sorry for myself because I didn’t get to cook on Talk of The Town today. They were happy to have me but I was worried about being able to get out this morning with the prediction of fresh coat of snow. We do have a challenging hill or two.
It was still snowing early this morning so I walked to Radnor Lake. It was stunningly beautiful; I walked around a bit and took a ton of pictures. Now I’m home and it feels like it’s time to bake something. I have bananas that probably would not have been starring on TV this morning due to some rather unattractive brown spots. We have enjoyed my usual recipe for banana bread several times and while its really good, I wanted to mess around in the kitchen and see what could be invented on a cold snowy morning. How about a chocolate swirl bread with rum, orange and ginger? That sounds kind of fun. Do I dare call it healthy? Bananas are good for you, chocolate is good for you, and aren’t we supposed to have one drink a day? There’s the rum!
This was easy to make and I only had to clean two bowls – well my husband licked the chocolate one, but it still had a run through the dishwasher. I think banana bread is very easy to make, probably because I don’t follow the usual rules. For example why should I mash up the bananas if I have a perfectly good mixer to do it for me. Why melt the butter if it’s getting mixed in anyway – catch my drift. So basically I mixed up butter, put in two bananas and added in the rest of the stuff. In the microwave I melted a good chocolate bar with a little more butter. I stirred a third of the batter into the chocolate and poured it in a prepared pan alternating spoons of chocolate batter and regular batter. Bake and it’s done! A major plus is that it looks really cool, like you spent lots of time inventing those swirls. So here we are, my house smells great, I’ve had a nice long walk, I get to enjoy another day of beautiful snow and all the fantastic birds we get at our nine feeders. I love a snow day, or two or three.
Ingredients
1 stick butter, room temperature
2 fairly ripe bananas
½ cup brown sugar
½ cup sugar
4 eggs
½ cup half and half or whole milk
Zest (peel) of one orange
1 Tbsp dark rum
1 ½ cups flour
1 tsp baking powder
½ tsp salt
½ tsp dry ginger
3.5 oz bar of dark chocolate
3 Tbsp butter
Directions
Preheat oven to 325 degrees.
Spray a bread pan with baking spray.
In the bowl of a standing mixer or with a hand held mixer, cream butter until smooth, about two minutes.
Add bananas and sugars a beat another minute.
Add in eggs and beat thoroughly. (Note: this is not pretty batter – it always looks kind of lumpy – don’t worry – pretty when cooked!)
Add milk and rum, combine to mix.
Add dry ingredient and mix just until blended.
Put chocolate and 3 Tbsp of butter in a medium size microwaveable bowl and melt stirring once about 90 seconds. (Or melt in a double boiler)
Mix about one third of the banana batter into the melted chocolate.
Fill bread pan with batter, alternating sides with chocolate batter and banana batter. It will run together a bit making great patterns (The Rorschach test of breads!).
Bake for about an hour and ten minutes until lightly browned. Cool completely before cutting. Delicious!
