Tuesdays With Dorie: Black-and-White Banana Loaf

Yay! No fruit! (Or, to be precise, no identifiable bits of fruit!) This week’s Tuesdays With Dorie pick (courtesy of Ashlee of A Year In The Kitchen; head on over there if you’d like the recipe) had a much subtler fruit presence than most of the recent recipes. It’s essentially a banana pound cake; half of the batter is mixed with chocolate, then the yellow and brown batters are swirled to make a lovely marble cake.

My ongoing issue with loaf pans (9×5? 8×4? who knows?) led to this being baked in one of those disposable aluminum pans, whose label said quite clearly that it was 8×4 (and was bought for that very reason). But no, when measured (alas, too late), it turned out to be 7×3. There was spillage. (Which wasn’t terrible, because I scraped it up off the foil I had presciently put under the pan and ate it!)

So the finished cake was not the prettiest thing I ever made (although Sunday’s challah may have been), and I don’t think it was entirely baked in the middle. But it was delicious, especially drizzled with homemade chocolate syrup. Husband said it seemed more like a quick bread than a pound cake, but he’s insane. It wasn’t entirely pound cake-y, but I think that’s because it didn’t bake long enough.

A lot of comments on the TWD site mentioned that their batter was too runny for good marbling. I don’t know why that would be; mine was quite thick. (The photo is terrible — I enlisted #1 Son to shoot it, and there’s really no natural light in my kitchen — but it does show the consistency of the batter.)

The finished product was moist and dense and banana-y and chocolate-y and really all you could ask for in a cake. This one’s a keeper. Go and make it. Now. And check out everyone else’s versions at Tuesdays With Dorie.