Chocolate Chip Coconut Banana Bread Recipe

Hi, I’m Stephanie Gallagher for About.com food. And today, were making banana bread
with coconut. Let’s get started.

I like to start with very ripe, black bananas for banana bread so the banana bread will
come out really sweet. So, we want to start by placing three to four bananas in the bottom
of a large mixing bowl and we’re just going to mash the bananas and it’s super easy when
your bananas are really ripe or even overripe. As you can see it only takes a second.

And once you bananas are mashed, you want to add a third of a cup of coconut oil. I’m
using extra virgin coconut oil and there are two reasons for that. One, it tastes great, it
provides a saddle coconut flavor and also, coconut oil has some health benefits. And to
that I’m going to add three quarters of a cup of sugar and then we are just going to blend
it all with our mixer.

And to that, I’m going to add one large egg and blend that in. Okay, and then so well
incorporated and nice and smooth. And the last thing I’m going to add to our wet
ingredient is a teaspoon of vanilla. I just think vanilla makes everything tastes good and
we’ll just blend that in.

And I’ve got one and three quarters of a cup of whole wheat pastry flour and to the whole
wheat pastry flour, I’m adding one and a quarter teaspoons of baking soda, a half of a
teaspoon of cinnamon, and we’re going to mix that all together.

Now, we take our dry ingredients so we add them to our wet ingredients and I find that
when you use a hand mixer, you don’t have to worry about adding the flour slowly -- dry
ingredients slowly because you can control the temperature of a mixer and where
everything goes.

So just mix that in on low speed until it’s all well incorporated. You want to be careful
with quick breads like banana bread not to over mix. Over mixing makes the bread very,
very tough.

Once everything is well incorporated, now we get to add our flavoring ingredients. We’re
adding half a cup of flaked coconut, yum, and half cup of chocolate chips because
coconut and chocolate chips go beautifully together. We can just mix in our coconut and
our chocolate chips by hand.

And now I’m going to take my banana bread butter and pour it into a well greased loaf
pan. You can use butter or cooking spray to grease your loaf pan. Just smooth up the
butter with your spatula and the bread goes into a preheated 350º oven to bake for one
hour.

I just want to check and see if your banana bread is done by putting a knife in and if
comes out clean its ready and this banana bread is. I just want to go around the edges of
the pan with your knife before releasing the banana bread. Wow! Flip it over.