Whole Wheat Chocolate Chip Banana Bread

Whole Wheat Chocolate Chip Banana Bread

Before we had kids, I always had so many leftover bananas and it was banana bread galore on weekends at my house! With two banana-loving kiddos now, my stash of bananas is always gone before they over-ripen to make banana bread. So now I literally have to buy 16 bananas on Mondays to last us for the week and hope there’s some leftover for baking purposes, smoothies and other bananaful concoctions!

This Whole Wheat Chocolate Chip Banana Bread is one of my favorite ways to use over-ripened bananas. It’s such a versatile recipe that you can switch up by adding walnuts, blueberries, dried fruit or whatever you’ve got going on in your pantry that needs to be purged. I literally threw macadamia nuts and goji berries once…but isn’t that how magic usually happens in the kitchen??

Ok, so the batter is pretty simple to make. You’ve got your wet ingredients in one bowl and the dry ingredients in the other, and then they come together in harmony, but not too much harmony because we all know over-mixing banana bread can make it pretty dry. So, this is what the batter will look like when you pour it into the greased loaf pan.

And this is the what whole wheat chocolate chip banana bread will look like when it comes out: puffed up, golden color with melted cute little chocolate chips.

Now, there’s that moment when you’re trying to decide how soon is too soon to cut into this beautiful loaf so you can enjoy it warm and gooey without burning your fingers. And that moment is about 5-10 minutes after it comes out of the oven. So be patient friends, and then enjoy it, because I know you will and you know you will! YUM to the O!

Beauty shots make me so hungry 🙂

Hope you love it as much as we do!

• 1/3 cup coconut oil, melted and slightly cooled
• 1/2 cup coconut sugar
• 2 tsp vanilla extract
• ¼ cup 2% milk
• 2 eggs
• 3 medium bananas, mashed
• 1¾ cup whole wheat pastry flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• ½ tsp salt
• ⅔ cup dark chocolate chips

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 350F and lightly grease a loaf tin with coconut oil, set aside.
2. In a medium bowl, whisk together coconut oil, coconut sugar, vanilla extract and milk until combined. Then whisk in the eggs, and the mashed banana. Set Aside.
3. In another small bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, cinnamon and salt.
4. Tip the wet ingredients into the bowl with the dry ingredients and in as few movements as possible, stir until *just* combined. (This is VERY important, over mixing could make your banana bread dry and tough).
5. Slightly fold in the chocolate chips.
6. Bake for 55 minutes - 1 hour in the center of the oven, until a toothpick inserted in the center of the loaf comes out clean.
7. Cool for 5 minutes, slice and serve.