Banana Nutella Bread

This is part of a continuing series of posts chronicling favorite internet recipes we've encountered over the years. Some recipes are in their original form, while most have been adapted to fit our personal tastes and cooking styles.

I am easily suggestible. I'm an advertisers wet dream, really. If you suggest something, I will want to run out and buy it, bake it, or eat it right away. It's a sickness. People twitter new recipes and they almost immediately go into my bookmarks. Someone suggested a dinner idea recently & I went looking for a recipe for it (especially since it fit in with the no meat, no sugar, no caffeine thing I'm doing at the moment. The "no caffeine" part lasted until I took excedrin for my headache 36 hours after I started. GO FIGURE).

So when one of my knitting people twittered a link to this recipe for Nutella Swirled Banana Bread, I had to try it. Even better, I had 4 overripe bananas sitting in my kitchen just WAITING to be turned into banana bread. Because I buy them and then forget they exist until they're only good for banana bread. It's a sick little cycle.

Naturally, I made a few small changes to try to make this healthier and use up the bananas I had on hand. Here's what I did:

4 small to medium mashed very ripe bananas

1/2 cup dark brown sugar

1/2 cup low fat sour cream

1/4 cup unsweetened applesauce

2 eggs

2 cups all-purpose flour

1 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp salt

1/3-1/2 cup Nutella

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease a large bread pan (I always just spray it down with Pam).

Combine the first 4 ingredients in a medium/large bowl using an electric mixer. Mix in remaining ingredients (except the Nutella) until combined.

Pour about half the batter into your greased loaf pan. Top with half the Nutella & swirl it into the batter. Repeat with the second half of the batter & Nutella.

Bake about 65 minutes (mine only baked for about 45-50 & was a little too moist, so next time I'd leave it in another 5-10 minutes, but my toothpick was clean!). Cool in the pan for about 10 minutes, then remove it to a wire rack to cool completely.

The Nutella in these does get all ooey gooey the next day (and next), so this is not a clean bread to eat. But oh, it's delicious. Try it now. Don't make it mere days before you decide to try to go off sugar. It's not a good idea.