sweet and pea

Do you ever get tired of making the same thing over and over again, even though it’s really good? That’s how I feel about banana bread.

I love the look of marbled cakes, so I decided to create a marbled banana bread, and flavoured it with chocolate and cinnamon. I used two teaspoons of cinnamon so that the scent would really come through, but the cinnamon could easily be reduced or omitted.

Adding walnuts to the cocoa batter and chocolate chips to the cinnamon batter would be a great way to add to the marble effect.

The cake is moist and light and very satisfying to make, have fun with the swirls.

Ingredients:

1/2 cup olive oil (or vegetable oil)

1 cup brown sugar

2 large eggs

1 1/3 cups + 1/3 cups flour (spoons and levelled and divided)

3 ripe medium bananas

1/4 cup buttermilk

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoon cinnamon

1/4 cup cocoa powder

Steps:

1. Preheat oven to 350C. Butter and flour a 9X5 inch loaf pan
2. Using the whisk attachment of a stand mixer whip brown sugar and eggs until light and doubled in size
3. slowly whisk in olive oil, buttermilk, and vanilla extract
4. Mash or finely chop bananas and fold into egg mixture
5. Fold in 1 and 1/3 cup of flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt
6. Remove 1/3 of batter into a separate bowl and fold in cocoa powder
7. Fold remaining 1/3 cup of flour and cinnamon into the 2/3 mixture left
8. Spoon batter into loaf pan, alternating between chocolate and cinnamon
9. Using a wooden skewer draw an ‘S’ shaped line through the batter to create swirls
10. Bake in centre of oven for 60-65 minutes
11. Cool in pan for 30 minutes before inverting onto a wire rack