Banana bread is fast becoming a favourite in our household, especially as someone (who shall remain nameless for the time being) absolutely craves it the morning after a heavy night of drinking. We love it as it’s easy to make, always a favourite and you can easily make little changes to make it with whatever you have in or crave, whether it be additional fresh apricot, pecans or chocolate – in our case left-over minstrels from a cinema trip.

We like to make enough for a loaf and a handful of muffins, so that should it last beyond the weekend, you can easily take one of the muffins to work without any of the effort of cutting.

Preparation time: 15 minutes

Cooking time: 40 minutes

Ingredients:

• 375g self-raising flour
• 5 bananas (starting to turn brown)
• 120g chocolate (of your choice)
• 3 tbsp apple juice
• 180g unsalted butter – softened
• 3 eggs
• ¾ ground cinnamon
• 3 tbsp agave syrup (or runny honey if you don’t have any)

Recipe:

1. Pre-heat the oven to 180ºC. Grease and line a bread tin with greaseproof paper and also grease a muffin tray. You’ll find you have more than enough mixture for the tin and the muffin tins are an easy way to use it up, a perfect portion size!
2. Mash the bananas in a bowl with a fork then mix in the agave syrup.   
3. Cut up your chocolate into small pieces, so for Minstrels cut into quarters.
4. In a large bowl, beat the butter with the flour, cinnamon and eggs – adding one at a time, so the mixture doesn’t split.
5. Fold in the banana mixture and chocolate and transfer to the bread tin and muffin tin.
6. Put the bread tin in the oven. After 10 minutes add the muffin tin to the oven and cook both for a further 30 minutes (so the loaf has had a total of 40 minutes), by which time everything should be ready at once. You can test this by piercing the banana bread with a clean knife, which should come out clean
7. Leave to cool for 10 minutes before transferring to a wire rack to leave to cool properly. Serve the first slice slightly warm with a cup of tea.