Blackout Chocolate Banana Bread

What began as chocolate banana bread “turned into blackout cake,” said former staffer Molly Baz of this recipe, when she “decided to double down and use both cocoa powder and chopped chocolate.” When a dash of whole wheat flour made its way into the mix, the recipe strayed even further from BA’s Best Banana Bread. The addition was not an attempt at health, mind you. Instead, Molly says, “It brings out the nuttiness of the chocolate.” Well, okay.

Still, this double chocolate banana bread recipe is very delicious and very flexible: If you don’t have whole wheat flour, you can substitute with more all-purpose. You can swap in dark chocolate chips or your favorite baking wafers for the chopped chocolate bars—and throw in an equal amount of toasted walnuts or pecans if you feel so moved. If you always have Greek yogurt on hand but never sour cream, that’s fine, says Molly, though you won’t quite achieve the moist crumb she was after. You could use natural cocoa, Dutch-process cocoa, or a combination. While the former offers a more robust chocolate flavor, the latter brings a darker, richer color (they also react differently to leavening agents, so don’t consider this carte blanche to use them interchangeably). You could also sprinkle the top with flaky sea salt if you’d like. One essential: You must use overripe bananas, so make this quick bread when you have a pile of spotty brown bananas on the counter or wait until they ripen.

The sliced banana garnish isn’t just “a thing of beauty,” notes Molly. The entire top of the cake (let’s face it, this fudgy chocolate-chocolate chip banana bread is a cake) gets a final sprinkling of demerara or raw sugar before hitting the oven. The sugar “melts and caramelizes and lacquers the banana” as it bakes. Essentially, the banana gets brûléed, intensifying that banana flavor and creating an intoxicating aroma. Could you skip this step too? Sure…but who would want to?