Another chocolate recipe for my quest to use chocolate more often in my baking, starting last week with my homemade chocolate syrup and continuing with chocolate and banana loaf. The absolute thing I love about this cake is the fact no one could tell it had banana in it. Now let me explain, I bake with banana’s a lot. At least once a week, they are my favourite fruit and I always have huge bunches in the house and I like to eat them when they are still a bit green.















The minute they are all yellow I don’t like to eat them as they are, I don’t know why I just don’t. So I blend them or bake with them. I never tire of them but my partner does, he is not the world’s biggest banana cake fan (freak I know!) but unless I want a crane to lift me out of my house I need to bake things he will eat and I can give away to others.















So I decided to be a bit sneaky, I only had a couple of overly ripe banana’s they were almost black and I was never going to eat them and for me they were too far gone for even a smoothie for my liking anyway. So I set out to make a cake that needed bananas but didn’t taste of bananas. As lets face it bananas lend such a natural sweetness to cake and helps keep it moist. And I had my self-imposed chocolate challenge to follow!















So it was going to be a chocolate cake, I had a lovely bar of super dark chocolate in the cupboard and I always have cocoa powder in the house. I came up with the idea that if I used this chocolate which was 85% cocoa it would mask the flavour of almost anything, you don’t need to go that strong any good quality dark chocolate would work well but the 85% cocoa chocolate was really nice.















When I served it to my partner I drizzled my homemade chocolate syrup over it for an extra chocolaty hit. As he sat eating it I held my breath, would he guess there was banana in it? No, he didn’t I let out the breath I was holding. I had managed to disguise the banana successfully.















Now if you do want a stronger banana flavour use another banana, normally in any cake recipe that calls for bananas I add a minimum of 4 small or 3 large overly ripe bananas. You could do this with this recipe it would work wonderfully, this time I was trying to hide the flavour a bit.















All the sneakiness aside this is a wonderfully dark rich chocolate loaf that doesn’t need buttercream to tart it up. The chocolate syrup was more than enough or a little double (heavy) cream drizzled on top would make a perfect dessert or indulgent tea time treat. The bananas help keep it moist and the melted chocolate just tastes divine there really is no other word for it. And it’s simple to make apart from the chocolate that you need to melt. Everything goes into just one bowl, and that equals less dishes to clean!

So if you have fussy kids or a pain in the a^&* partner this is a good way to sneak a little fruity goodness into their diet 😉



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