Chocolate-Chip Banana Bread

On Friday evening, Carlos and I ventured out to Flatbread in Burlington for some amazing food that we were sure was illegal in 48 states. Flatbread is all about keeping things local. They buy as many locally-grown and locally-produced items as they can for their menu. Even their beer, wine and spirits are as local as possible. We had a delicious pizza topped with free-range chicken, beans, corn, jalapenos, tomatoes and sour cream. Mmm... I really wish I had taken a photograph, it was a thing of beauty. After we nommed that, we reluctantly (yet willingly) took a look at the dessert menu and Carlos kept pounding his finger at the Chocolate-Chip Banana Bread option. So that's what we got! They took a slice of the bread, toasted it in their clay oven. Then they cut it on the diagonal, pour hot fudge sauce over the top and serve it with two scoops of vanilla ice cream and home-made whipped cream. It was heaven.

The following day, I decided to try to make my own Chocolate-Chip Banana Bread because that half-a-slice I had just wasn't enough! I really love Emeril Lagasse's Banana Bread recipe, so I altered a bit to create the Chocolate-Chip version. I took out the walnuts and replaced them with the chips and reduced the sugar from 3/4 cup to 1/2 cup.

Ingredients:

2 ripe bananas, chopped
1/2 cup of sour cream
2 eggs
2 teaspoons of vanilla

10 tablespoons of butter mostly melted and cooled

2 cups of flour
1/2 cup of sugar
1 teaspoon of baking soda
3/4 teaspoon of baking powder
1/2 teaspoon of salt
1 cup of chocolate chips
Ghirardelli Milk Chocolate ones are great!)

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Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Add the chopped bananas into a bowl and mix with a hand-held blender or puree in a food processor. Or you could just mash them by hand with a couple of forks. Add the sour cream, eggs and vanilla and mix thoroughly.

In a separate larger bowl, add the flour, sugar, baking soda, baking powder and salt and mix together. Add chocolate chips and toss to coat. This is an important step so that the chocolate chips don't sink to the bottom of the bread.

Add your melted and cooled butter to the banana mixture and incorporate thoroughly. Fold that into the dry mixture until no flour is showing.

Add it to a buttered loaf pan and bake for 1 hour and 10 minutes. Take it out and cool for a good while before you attempt to take it out of the pan.