Banana Rama

   I took a break from bread baking to vacation with my amazing husband for our anniversary. Wouldn't you know, the day I got back to work I heard: "Where's the bread?!" It pleased me.
   Last night we finally got our house back in order, unpacked the suitcases and cleaned the kitchen. I pulled out the Bread Bible and turned to a banana muffin recipe. I had been saving some over-ripe bananas in the freezer so I pulled two out for a double recipe. There was a variation in the muffin recipe for chocolate banana swirl loaf. Both sounded yummy so I made enough batter to make both.
   It was a pretty quick recipe, much like a cake batter. Mix and bake. Bananas, sour cream, egg, vanilla, flour, sugar, baking soda and powder, salt and butter. Fold in the walnuts. My husband usually doesn't like to lick the spoon or bowl, but he really loves banana bread so he opted to taste this one :) I spooned some of the batter into a 12 count muffin pan and saved the rest for my chocolate swirl bread. I melted 2 ounces of semi-sweet chocolate and added it to half of the remaining batter. In a loaf pan, I layered the banana batter and chocolate batter. With a coffee stirring stick, I swirled them together in the pan.
   The loaf needed 45 minutes to bake but the muffins only took about 25. When they were done, I gave a muffin to Ian to taste and stored the rest in a tupperware container to take to work. The loaf came out looking delicious and chocolatey with little cracks in the top of it. I transfered it to a wire rack to cool and then wrapped it in tinfoil. I was a little worried the tinfoil would keep it too warm and continue the cooking process and dry the bread out. I think I might have been right because when I cut the loaf this morning, it was a little dryer than I prefer for banana bread. The muffins were pretty much just right. The office loves them.