Bring out your over ripe bananas! This recipe is perfect to use up that fruit that's been sitting out too long and is turning a shade of brown close to black. I had three bananas just waiting for me to find a good enough sounding recipe for banana chocolate cake. I had almost no luck finding recipes online. My usual haunts, epicurious.com and the Food Network website were both busts. I did a more general google search and found only a few things. So, this evening when I got home I checked out my cake recipe book that I neglected to consider earlier, and I found this decent sounding recipe to try.

Banana Chocolate Cake
From Company's Coming Cakes by Jean Paré

• 3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) butter or margarine, softened
• 1 3/4 cups granulated sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 1/4 cups mashed banana (about 3 bananas)
  
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 3/4 cup cocoa
• 1 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 3/4 teaspoon salt
• 3/4 cup sour milk*

* to make sour milk add 1 tablespoon white vinegar to the measuring cup and fill to 3/4 cup with milk

Directions:

• Preheat oven 350°F.
• Cream butter with sugar and 1 egg together very well.
• Beat in second egg.
• Mix in banana and vanilla.
• Mix flour, cocoa, baking powder, baking soda, and salt together in a medium sized bowl.
• Add flour mixture to butter mixture in 3 parts alternately with sour milk in 2 parts, beginning and ending with flour.
• Spread in 2 greased round 8 or 9-inch layer pans.
• Bake in oven until an inserted toothpick comes out clean, about 40 minutes.

About this recipe: I didn't cream the butter and sugar together with the one egg. I creamed just the butter and sugar together and then, when it was light and fluffy, added the eggs one at a time beating well between each. This is the more traditional method but probably both work.

I used Hershey's Special Dark cocoa instead of their regular cocoa because I really enjoy the rick dark flavor and I thought it would be especially suited to compliment the banana. Tasting will tell if I'm right. I also was very stingy on the sugar since there's a lot called for. I probably put in more like 1 1/4 cups of sugar in the end.

The sour milk: I thought that by adding the tablespoon of vinegar that it would just make a tangy milk, but it really does actually curdle the milk! I was so surprised. So don't worry if you're milk curdles, that's what's supposed to happen.

The batter was on the thick side and tasted very yummy so I have high hopes that this cake will be yummy too. It reminds me a bit of the zucchini chocolate cake and we all know what a winner that one is so it bodes well.

I didn't feel like frosting a layer cake so I made a tray of my mini-flower bundt pans as well as three additional mini-bundts. They just came out of the oven, the mini-bundts taking only 25 minutes while the mini-flowers took slightly longer, perhaps 29 minutes, to finish cooking.

The result: a chocolate cake where the banana stands out front and center, which is exactly what I was looking for. The texture was moist and tender and it was still sweet in spite of my being the Ebenezer of sugar. Not with every bite, but occasionally, the flavor was a little bitter. That could have been from not enough sugar or from the special dark cocoa. In the future, I may use 1/2 regular cocoa and 1/2 of the special dark to mellow it out just a bit.