Upgrade Banana Bread With The Perfect End-Of-Summer Topping
One of the great charms of banana bread is its sweet versatility. It works as the ideal canvas for numerous flavors, from the nutty accents of brown butter to the bittersweet notes of chocolate. It can work as a sweet compost pile, welcoming in coffee grounds as well as miscellaneous candy and even your favorite trail mix. Basically, whatever flavors you're craving, the natural sweetness of banana bread can more than hold its own against it.
With that in mind, think about giving your banana bread a summer twist revolving around the gooey magic of s'mores. Punctuated with melted chocolate, roasted marshmallows, and golden graham crackers, s'mores bring you straight back to your childhood circled around the campfire. When used as a topping for banana bread, it unites two nostalgic classics into one perfect loaf. Plus, it works as the ultimate farewell toast to summertime. So how should you go about adding a s'mores topper to your favorite banana bread recipe?
Make it a s'mores banana bread mashup
To kick it off, think about grabbing ingredients that are miniature — snack-size chocolate bars and mini marshmallows — so that the top of the banana bread doesn't get overly crowded with jumbo-sized ingredients. For the graham crackers, crumble them up or break them up into shards.
Once you've got the properly proportioned ingredients in order, you can make the banana bread of your choice. Go for a relatively plain recipe so that the s'mores toppings will have a chance to shine. The final step is to decide when you'd like to add the topping. For a freshly melted take, you can add everything when the banana bread is hot out of the oven, letting the chocolate and marshmallows melt together from the residual heat. If you want a more roasted effect, you can add the marshmallows to the banana bread in the last 10 to 15 minutes of the baking time. However you make it, you really need to eat the s'mores encrusted banana bread while it's still warm in order to get the ultimate just-melted bite. It's the perfect end-of-summer treat.