I love banana bread so I decided to bake a banana and chocolate loaf for the weekend. It was very easy to make, I just put everything in a mixing bowl, beat it with the electric mixer and poured it into a cake tin. Then the oven baked it very nicely! I used gluten-free flour and dairy-free baking spread, but feel free to use normal flour or butter if you don’t have allergies like me.

You’ll need:

• 2 ripe bananas
• 75g soft butter or dairy-free spread
• 150g gluten-free self-raising  flour
• 75g soft brown sugar
• 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda (also called as baking soda)
• 2 eggs (from free-range chickens)
• 75g  good quality dark chocolate chunks

This is how to make it:

1. Preheat the oven 160°C. Grease and line a medium loaf tin with baking paper.
2. Peel the bananas and put them in a large bowl. Mash them with a fork, then add the butter/spread, eggs, vanilla and sugar. Using and electric, hand-held mixer, whiz until you get a smooth mixture.
3. Sieve the flour and bicarbonate of soda over the banana mixture, then gently fold in until you get a smooth batter.
4. Smash the chocolate into small chunks and stir these into the batter.
5. Transfer the batter into the cake tin, letting the mixture spread out evenly. (Tap or shake the tin a bit for the mixture to spread).
6. Bake for about 55-60 minutes until the top is golden-brown. Ask an adult to do a skewer-test to make sure the cake is cooked through.
7.  If it is, take it out of the oven, let it cool for 10 minutes, then remove the cake from the the tin onto a wire rack.
8. When the cake is completely cool, slice it and enjoy!

Tips:

• You can use milk chocolate if you don’t like bitter chocolate and you don’t have milk allergy!
• Make sure the top of the cake is nice, golden brown!
• You can pour some melted chocolate or icing over the cooled cake, if you like!