Food Friday: Chocolate Banana Bread

Rich, moist, chocolate-y and a way to use up on-their-way-out bananas: the perfect recipe--

Chocolate Banana Bread

1 1/4 cups plain flour 
1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup room temperature butter, no substitutes
1 cup sugar
2 large eggs
4 very ripe bananas, mashed
1/2 cup plain Greek yogurt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 cup chocolate chips

Whisk the first four ingredients together and set aside.  In mixer bowl combine butter, sugar and eggs and beat on high for 2 minutes until creamy and light.  Add the mashed bananas (OR if you are like me, just throw in the almost-gone-by bananas and let them mash in the mixer bowl with everything else...), yogurt, and vanilla and beat another minute or two until smooth.

Stir the chocolate chips into the dry ingredients to coat...in the possibility that the chips will not sink to the bottom.  Add these ingredients into the wet ingredients and stir until flour disappears.

Pour into a well-greased 9 by 5 loaf pan and bake for 55-65 minutes.  Be sure NOT to use a smaller pan or you will have overflow onto the floor of the oven, OR if you were smart enough to imagine there might be overflow, onto the cookie sheet you placed on the next lower rack of the oven just in case.  That overflowed batter makes pretty good eating, except for the burned part on the bottom...!

Remove from oven then let cool in pan fifteen minutes then carefully loosen the edges and remove from pan to a cooling rack.  To be sure the bread is cooked, it would be a good idea to stick in a toothpick and have it come out clean.

Here is all that is left of this very moist, chocolate-y banana bread. I took the rest to a Relief Society activity.  It was mostly popular.  Always makes me happy to provide something edible...