Chocolate Banana Swirl Cake

This wonderful cake can be made with little effort. If you like bananas, this is a cake you'll definitely love - it's very banana-y. I didn't bother frosting it but decided to create some swirls on the surface of the batter instead for a pretty finish. I baked this late one night and took it in to work the next day - it disappeared pretty quickly.

My cake was inspired by this recipe from Week Of Menus. I made a few changes to come up with a slightly healthier alternative.

Here's what needs to be done:

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Grease and flour a 9-inch cake pan.

In a bowl, mix together these dry ingredients-

• 1 ¼ cups all-purpose flour
• ¼ unsweetened cocoa powder
• 1 tsp baking soda
• ¼ tsp salt

In another bowl, beat together:

• 5 Tbsp softened butter
• 2 oz melted semi-sweet chocolate chips
• ¾ cup sugar
• 2 eggs
• 2 ripe bananas, mashed well
• ¾ cup yogurt
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 tsp rum extract

Combine the dry and wet ingredients together. Mix well. The batter will be a relatively thick one.

Add 2 ounces semi-sweet chocolate chips to the batter and mix again.

Pour the batter into the prepared cake pan.

Melt 2 ounces of white chocolate. Drop small blobs of the melted chocolate all over the surface of the batter and run a toothpick through it to create beautiful swirls.

Bake for 50-60 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out relatively clean.

Cool, slice and serve.

Notes: I was a little disappointed that I could not taste the rum or vanilla flavors in the cake. I could not even taste the chocolate in the cake though I'd added almost 6 ounces of it in addition to the cocoa powder. The banana flavor had overpowered all of the other flavors in the cake. Next time, I'd like to try adding some coffee to the cake for a different taste.

I'm sending this over to Deeba for the Fruit in Baking edition of the Monthly Mingle event that she's hosting.