Chocolate Banana Bread With Sunflower Seeds

A deliciously moist and tasty banana bread, it’s full of flavour with the addition of the chocolate, chilli, cinnamon and vanilla. The caramelised sunflower seeds sprinkled over the top also add some nice additional texture.

Chocolate Banana Bread with Sunflower Seeds

• Prep Time: 30 mins
• Cook Time: 45 mins
• Total Time: 1 hour 15 minutes
• Cuisine: Desserts

Ingredients

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• 70g of your favourite milk chocolate
• 4 ripe bananas
• 125g brown sugar
• 110g of unsalted butter (melted)
• 2 free range eggs
• 120ml nut milk + 50ml more to melt the chocolate (we used hazelnut milk)
• 420g all-purpose flour
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 tbsp rum
• 2 tsp vanilla extract
• 8 cardamon pods
• 1/4 tsp chilli powder
• 1/4 tsp cinnamon powder
• 1/4 tsp vanilla powder
• 20g caramelised sunflower seeds or other seeds/nuts

Instructions

1. Preheat your oven to 180C and prepare a bread tin, either lining it with baking paper or by greasing it with some olive oil.
2. In a large mixing bowl, mash the bananas with a potato masher. You don’t need your mixture to be 100% smooth, so don’t be concerned with a few small lumps. Set to one side.
3. In another mixing bowl, whisk the eggs and then add the melted butter, rum, vanilla extract, brown sugar and salt. Then add the flour slowly, stirring your mixture with a wooden spoon as you do, followed by the baking powder and baking soda. Once you’ve folded in your flour, add milk slowly, mixing with the wooden spoon until you have a thick wet dough.
4. Open the cardamon pods and using a mortar and pestle crush the seeds to powder. Add to the dough.
5.  Take you chocolate and melt it in a saucepan over a very low heat together with 50ml of nut milk. Once it has completely melted, add the chilli powder, cinnamon and vanilla.
6. Now mix your banana mixture with your dough.
7. Pour 2/3 of the chocolate sauce over the banana mixture.
8. Then using a rubber spatula, gently fold the chocolate sauce into the dough. Try not to over mix, that way you’ll get the swirls of chocolate through the cake when it is baked.
9. Carefully pour the mixture into your bread tin. Make sure to leave some space on the top, because your cake will rise a bit in the oven.
10. Drizzle the remaining chocolate sauce over the top.
11. Then scatter over your caramelised sunflower seeds, or just some plain seeds or nuts if you don’t have these.
12. Bake in your preheated oven for about 45min or until a skewer comes out clean from the bread.