Peanut Chocolate Swirl Banana Bread (vegan)

 reading time: 3 min

Hello my fellow freckly-banana-lovers!

Honestly, there's nothing better than a bunch of spotty, overly ripe "leopard" bananas. You can freeze them to make smoothies or a variety of nicecreams, or you can mash them easily to make delicious, naturally sweet banana bread or even waffles. The riper the better!

I already have three different banana bread recipes here on my blog, all from ages ago, but I never really strayed from the path of combining bananas with some type of flour, oil and plant milk. So today I want to share something a little more exciting with you, and that's peanut butter chocolate banana bread. With a pretty swirl and a soft crunch from roasted peanuts and a bit of melted sweetness from the chocolate chips.

Only recently have I been made aware that banana bread (along with Dalgona coffee, cloud bread, pancake cereal, and sourdough bread) has become something like a pandemic food trend over the past year or so. Which is weird to me because I made a bunch of banana breads BEFORE the pandemic and NONE at all during the pandemic (until now), but as I mentioned in my blog post on What the Corona Crisis Teaches Us, I think it's great that people start to make their own bread again, or in this case, banana bread. (By the way, this was our sweet sustenance for a lovely canoe trip last weekend!)

So let's get started!


PEANUT CHOCOLATE SWIRL BANANA BREAD

Preparation time: 60 mins
 Main ingredients: banana, flour, peanut butter, cocoa powder
difficulty level: easy
 makes: 1 loaf
suitable for: vegan, lactose-free, wheat-free, soy-free, sugar-free, low-sodium

Ingredients

3-4 spotty ripe bananas, mashed (about 1 1/2 cups) *
 1 cup whole-grain spelt flour
1/2 cup ground rolled oats (or spelt flour)
1/2 cup ground buckwheat (or spelt flour)
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp cinnamon
4 tbsp liquid coconut oil or sunflower oil or softened vegan butter
4 tbsp plant-based milk of your choice
1 tbsp apple cider vinegar or kombucha or lemon juice
1/2 cup creamy peanut butter (or replace with sunflower butter, almond butter, tahini, or any other nut or seed butter)
1 tbsp unsweetened cocoa powder

optional (but recommended):
2 tbsp chopped peanuts
1/3 cup vegan semisweet chocolate chips or chopped semisweet chocolate (this makes it not sugar-free any more, obviously)

* I reduced the amount of additional sugar to zero as the bananas I used were really sweet. However, if you like your cakes very sweet, you may want to add a sweetener such as brown sugar, raw cane sugar, coconut blossom sugar, maple syrup or agave.


Instructions

Preheat oven to 350 F / 180 C.
In a medium bowl, mash bananas using a fork. If that isn't possible they aren't ripe enough and therefore not sweet enough! Add melted coconut oil (or alternative), milk of your choice, AVC (or alternative) and peanut butter. Mix well. Set aside.

In a separate bowl, combine spelt flour, oat flour, buckwheat flour, baking powder, and cinnamon. Whisk well, then slowly add to the wet mixture. Use an electric whisk to form a smooth batter with no clumps. Gently fold in chopped peanuts and chocolate.

Divide batter in half by placing the second half of the batter in the same separate bowl from before. Combine this half with unsweetened cocoa powder, and mix the batter until well combined. TIP: Instead of folding in the chocolate as described above, you could also melt the chocolate and only add this to this half of the batter to create a true marble effect!

Lightly grease a loaf pan. Alternate between the two batters and pour into the prepared pan. I started with the plain, added half of the chocolate batter, topped with plain again, another chocolate layer, then the rest of the plain on top. Use a knife to swirl the batters, don’t over swirl, you will then combine the batters. Run the knife one time through the pan – or omit this altogether and just roughly spoon each layer on top of each other without smoothing it too much. This is how I created my swirl.
Pour into a lightly greased or parchment lined loaf pan and bake for about 45 to 55 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the centre comes out clean and the loaf is golden brown. If your bread appears to be browning too quickly, place a tented piece of foil over it.

Let cool for 10 minutes before removing from the pan.
 
PRO TIP: Instead of putting the chocolate in the dough - or additionally even - you could use it to sprinkle the batter of your banana bread. Imagine them slowly melting ... yum!

 


Featured at the Friday Favorites Linky Party! 🤗

 


Looking for more banana recipes? Here are a few of my favourites:

Gooey Banana Bread (vegan)
No Churn Banoffee Pie Ice Cream (vegan)
Banana Split Smoothie (vegan)
♥

Maisy

2 Comments

  1. Jerri at Simply Sweet Home17 Jun 2021, 08:14:00

    Looks delicious! Thanks for linking up for Friday Favorites! I'm featuring you this week.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Maisy17 Jun 2021, 09:29:00

      Aw thank you, I feel very lucky to be featured again! Have the best day :) ~ Maisy

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