Bourbon Chocolate Chip Banana Bread

I had some leftover bananas on my counter (OK, on my rice cooker, to be accurate), and so I turned once again to the Joy the Baker Cookbook for a recipe. Since I already had my loaf pan out from last time, I figured I’d make some kind of banana bread. Luckily, the book had a recipe for banana bread, with chocolate chips and bourbon.

Bourbon Chocolate Chip Banana Bread
from Joy the Baker Cookbook

2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened
1 cup sugar
2 large eggs
1 1/2 cups mashed ripe bananas (about 3 or 4 bananas)
1 teaspoon lemon juice
3 tablespoons bourbon
1 cup coarsely chopped walnuts (optional)
1 cup semisweet chocolate chips

1. Preheat oven to 350F.
2. Grease and flour a 9×5-inch loaf pan.
3. Sift together the flour, baking powder, and salt and set aside.
4. Beat butter and sugar until light and fluffy.
5. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating after each egg.
6. Add the mashed bananas, lemon juice, and bourbon, and beat until mixed.
7. Add the flour mixture and beat until just incorporated.
8. Add the optional walnuts (I don’t like walnuts so I didn’t add any) and the chocolate chips, and stir to combine.
9. Pour the batter into the loaf pan.
10. Bake for 45 to 60 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.
11. Let the loaf cool in the pan for 20 minutes before turning out onto a wire rack to cool.

Here’s the mixture with the wet ingredients: butter, sugar, eggs, mashed bananas, lemon juice, and bourbon. I don’t know if it’s the lemon juice doing something in there, but it looks curdled and kinda nasty. Thankfully, it gets better from here.

After adding the flour mixture, it looks more like real batter.

And then the chocolate chips go in. If I approved of nuts in baked goods, they’d have gone in at this point, too. But I don’t, so I didn’t add any.

Into the loaf pan goes the batter.

Mine wasn’t quite done even after 60 minutes, so I left it in for another five minutes after that.

The top is a bit burnt after 65 minutes, but it’s not too bad.

I love how the top splits open like that. Even if it is a little bit brown up there.

This bread was a bit crumbly, for some reason. Perhaps the chocolate chips broke up the bread, or something. But I liked the taste of it. The combination of chocolate and banana was delicious. I couldn’t taste the bourbon at all, but other people said they could. Maybe I’ve been desensitized to the taste of alcohol.