Last one week had been tremendously busy and I had been away from this space from quite sometime. My family including my parents, sister, brother and nieces and nephew were here for over a week. And I took one week off from work. I did quite a many baking and  frozen recipes. Though I managed to take some hurried shots of the goodies I made for the kids, I barely got any time left for posting them up here. I spent my morning playing with kids, afternoon baking/cooking in kitchen and evenings in going out for shopping or eating out with family. It was busy but it was hell lot of fun.

I ordered my copy of award winning baker and cookbook author Dorie Greenspan’s Baking From my home to yours few days back, after sweet Ruchira, recommended the book. Flipping through the pages, I realized that she was right. “You wouldn’t need any other baking book, after you have this one in your collection.” {Though I know, it would be impossible to resist buying more books… 😛 }

The recipes are immensely inspirational and easily doable at home. Along with every recipe, Dorie has also given tips to play around with ingredients to create a new version from the original, effectively leading to a higher number of recipes in book. This book is a must buy for every home baker!

Puzzled with so many recipes, which I wanted to try from the book, my cute little niece made my problem resolved in just few seconds. She pointed her finger to few of the recipes from the book, one for a day, for the whole week. And if you’ve happened to read my previous post on Chocolate Yogurt Cake, you must have known that how much she only likes chocolate desserts.

So the obvious choice for her would have been with chocolate involved in it in some way or other. So we made muffins, loaves and cookies, with dear chocolate. Though we also made some ice creams and frozen pops also, which I’ll be posting about later.

This banana marbled loaf cake was the first one to be baked, as kids were really fascinated by those white and black swirls of cake together, after they saw the picture in the book. Swirls didn’t came out that clean, as they should have been. May be I did swirls a little extra, making the batter a bit more muddy. But kids still enjoyed the cake a lot. I did tweaked some of the ingredients in the book {omitted rum, cut down the amount of butter and eggs and compensated that with increasing milk}. It came out super moist and delicately sweet with bananas and had a subtle hint of nutmeg.

Ingredients

2 1/4 cups all purpose flour
1 stick plus 2 tbsp butter
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp freshly grated nutmeg
2 ripe bananas, peeled
1 tbsp fresh lemon juice
grated zest of 1/2 lemon
110 gm dark chocolate, chopped
2/3 cup light brown sugar
1/3 cup white sugar
4 large eggs
1 tsp pure vanilla extract
1 cup whole milk

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 160 degree Celsius and butter and flour an 10 1/2 x 4 x 2 1/2 inch loaf pan. Place the pan on 2 regular baking sheets and keep aside.
2. Whisk together flour, salt, baking powder and nutmeg.
3. In a small bowl, mash the bananas with lemon juice and zest.
4. Melt the chocolate with 2 tbsp of butter together in a microwave oven or on a double boiler.
5. In a separate bowl, beat the butter with an electric mixer, until pale and fluffy. Beat in both the sugars, for about 2-3 minutes.
6. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition, then beat in vanilla.
7. Reduce the mixer speed to low and add half of the flour mixture, mixing until it is just incorporated.
8. With mixer running, pour in the  milk and when it is blended, fold in the remaining flour mixture.
9. Scrape down the bowl and mix in the mashed bananas.
10. Pour little less than half of the batter over cooled melted chocolate and stir to blend.
11. Drop alternating spoonfuls of both the batters into the prepared pan, then taking a table knife, swirl the batters together, taking care not to overdo it.
12. Bake for 1 hour and 20 to 30 minutes with pan over baking sheets, until the knife inserted into the cake comes out clean. If cake starts to brown to much, cover loosely with a foil tent after 40 minutes of baking.
13. Once done, transfer the cake to a cooling rack and let cool in pan for about 15 minutes before unmolding, then cool the cake to room temperature.
14. In a bowl, whisk together sugar, egg, coffee, yogurt, chocolate, oil and vanilla, until well combined.
15. In an another bowl, sift flour, cocoa, baking powder, baking soda and salt.
16. Add the flour mixture to wet mixture and whisk to make a smooth batter.
17. Pour the batter into prepared pan and bake from 35-40 minutes, until a toothpick inserted into the center of cake comes out clean.
18. Let it cool in pan for 15 minutes and then invert on to wire rack to let cool completely.