TWD: Cocoa-Nana Bread

This week’s Cocoa-Nana bread had me all excited. I like the chocolate-banana combo (although I was surprised to hear how many people hate it), I loooove adding chocolate chips to banana bread or banana muffins, and we all know banana cake is best when topped with chocolate-sour cream frosting. And my very first TWD recipe was for her chocolate marbled banana loaf, which is still one of my very favorites. So basically, all this bread had to do was wink at me from the corner and I was prepared to love it forever.
However, this bread was the rarest of all specimens: the baked good that looks better than it tastes. Charlatan.
I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t love it either, and I was so ready to love it. Mostly I guess my taste buds were confused. The banana flavor wasn’t very prominent, so I mostly just tasted the chocolate. And the texture was more like a cake than a quick bread, but because of all the cocoa it wasn’t sweet enough to be chocolate cake. What…who…how…huh?

[How cute are sea otters?! That is all.]

The one thing this bread did have going for it was big chunks of chocolate. The nice folks at Dove sent me a Valentine’s package with their milk and dark chocolate hearts, so I chopped up a bunch of those (a wee bit more than the recipe calls for, perhaps. Ahem.) and they added some nice pockets of melted chocolate for my tasting pleasure.

(Also, did you know that they’re currently partnering with Martha Stewart, and inside each wrapper is a Martha-approved tip for making your Valentine’s picture-perfect? Some are rather smurfy, but some are going to be used as weapons of husband hypnosis to ensure that I’m spoiled this holiday. Red roses in bud vases arranged in the shape of a heart, here I come!)

So yes. This week was a reluctant thumbs down for me, but it did remind me of how much I loved the marbled banana bread, so I may go ahead and make that and call it a success after all.