April 2016 By i sugar coat it! 37 Comments

Walnut Chocolate Chunk Caramelized Banana Bread

This fully loaded Walnut Chocolate Chunk Caramelized Banana Bread, with browned butter, dark chocolate and caramelized bananas, is next level decadence!

We polished off this Walnut Chocolate Chunk Caramelized Banana Bread over a week ago, but I am salivating as I write this post. I know, I know... it's banana bread. It's been done a million times. You'll never see me make claims of anything being 'the best', but I gotta say this is pretty damn amazing.

I L.O.V.E banana bread!! Bananas were among the tropical fruit trees my grandparents grew in their backyard - mini bananas to be precise. They were my introduction to bananas as a child, but were too soon replaced with the store-bought standard that is more readily available in these parts. I see the minis often at the West Indian and Asian markets, but I can't seem to bring myself to buy them. Perhaps I'm just not ready to compete with that perfect childhood memory of sweet little pops of sunshine in my lunch box.

My grandmother would sometimes pick the bananas while they were still green and cook them as a side dish. My undeveloped palate just could not deal. She would boil them with a little salt and they would make their grey, slimy way onto our plates alongside more desirable items. Me, being the uber-stubborn child I was, would eat around them, to my grandmother's disdain. She and I had many a stand-offs when it came to food. Now that I know a little about resistant starch from green bananas and its benefits, I like to think my grandmother was ahead of her time.

When she wasn't force-feeding green bananas to five-year olds, she would use the over-ripened bananas for banana fritters/pancakes, cake, ice cream and bread. Although, she never added chocolate to her banana bread (she made a version with freshly grated coconut instead), we still managed to get along splendidly. Sweet order was temporarily restored to my five-year-old world.

So yeah... I LOVE bananas and banana bread! I make it quite often, but have only shared Chocolate Pecan Crunch and Peanut Butter & Jam versions in past posts. I especially love (and I've mentioned this a few times on the blog) using leftover slices of my less decadent version to make French toast. Talk about a brunch treat!! You should definitely try it some time.

As I was making a batch of browned butter (beurre noisette) for a recipe in an upcoming post, the Dude was lamenting about how long it had been since I made banana bread. He then suggested I use the browned butter in the banana bread, because he had really enjoyed it in a test batch of cookies I was working on the previous week and in these Chocolate Raspberry Madeleines. He certainly has his moments of genius!! But why stop at browned butter...

How about caramelized bananas, bitter-sweet chocolate chunks and perfectly toasted walnuts?

Those bananas left neglected on your kitchen counter are just begging to be reincarnated as this Walnut Chocolate Chunk Caramelized Banana Bread. They deserve nothing less, friends! Absolutely nothing less.

Give your neglected bananas a sweet, dying wish - Walnut Chocolate Chunk Caramelized Banana Bread

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