Ready for another vintage recipe? This new segment feature recipes our mothers and grandmothers used to make. This month’s recipe? Banana Chocolate Chip Bars!
I love to cook, and I really love to bake. If I had my way, I’d bake fresh cinnamon rolls with cream cheese buttercream frosting every single weekend! Alas, my family is working on improving our health, and that means yummy frosting is a once-in-a-while indulgence instead of every Saturday. Bummer.
One of my favorite cake-like bars does not feature fluffy frosting, and it even has some fruit in it. Practically a healthy dessert, right? Okay, I wouldn’t go that far! My mom, aunts, and both grandmothers were always making banana bread, and this has a slight twist–mini-chocolate chips! These bars are delicious and very easy to make.
Banana Chocolate Chip Bars
Time: 10 minutes prep
Bake: 30 minutes
Makes: 40 small bars (or 20 normal-sized bars)
Ingredients:
1 3/4 cups mashed ripe bananas (3-5 bananas, depending on size)
3/4 cup packed brown sugar
6 TBS melted butter or 1/4 cup vegetable oil
1/4 cup milk
2 large eggs
2 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp salt
1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup mini chocolate chips, divided
Instructions:
- Heat oven to 350 degrees F. Spray nonstick spray in 13×9 baking pan.
- Whisk mashed bananas, sugar, butter (or oil), milk, eggs, vanilla, baking soda, cinnamon, and salt in large bowl until mixed thoroughly. Whisk in flour just until blended. Gently stir in 1/2 cup of the mini chocolate chips.
- Spread batter in prepared pan. Sprinkle remaining mini chocolate chips over the top.
- Bake 15-20 minutes until toothpick comes out clean.
- Cool completely before serving.
I hope you enjoy this Banana Chocolate Chip Bar recipe!
If you could have one sweet treat every weekend, what would it be?
Jill Kemerer is a Publishers Weekly bestselling author of heartwarming, emotional, small-town romance novels often featuring cowboys. Her essentials include coffee, caramels, a stack of books and long walks outdoors in Ohio where she resides with her husband.
These sound delicious. If only I wasn’t allergic to bananas.
forgot to answer the question–anything chocolate.
Oh no! Allergic to bananas? Yikes! I’m a chocolate girl, too!
Turtle cheesecake (cheesecake with caramel, chocolate, and pecans)
Wow! I want a bite of that!
Mine would have to be chocolate truffles.
I LOVE chocolate!
Good morning Jill, nice to see you in another venue.
If I could have one dessert it would probably be a really good piece of wedding cake. With a couple of roses on top. Good thing for my health that I don’t go to too many weddings.
I love to bake, but my husband and I are both diabetics, so I do a lot of what I call “baking for the freezer.” I freeze most of it and give it away.
Kathy Bailey
I love wedding cake, too! With a cup of coffee, of course. 🙂
You have a good system with the baking. That way you can eat a little!
A creme horn. I get them at Walmart. I simply LOVE them. Second would be a frosted soft sugar cookie.
I could go on and on as I love sweets.
I’m fond of both! Yum!
Crush nuts on a cinnamon pastry with caramel frosting.
That’s my hubby’s favorite kind of cinnamon roll!
Any thing chocolate would be good. My neighbor brought me a few pieces of strawberry bananas bread last week and it was awesome.
Ooh, that sounds delicious!
This sounds good!! Cinnamon rolls would be my choice!!
I’m obsessed with cinnamon rolls! I make them from scratch with a cream cheese buttercream frosting. So good!
Anything that has chocolate in it. The recipe sounds delicious ?
Me too! Thank you!
anything that has chocolates, recently been loving the Dove brand chocolates 🙂
Those Dove Promises don’t make it long in my house!
I’m like you Jill, I love to bake, so you’ve given me too many choices! Our family’s favorite chocolate chip recipe is a bar cookie called Congo Squares (I suspect my Grandma Irene found the recipe in one of Boston’s newspapers many years ago [I was a kid in the ’60’s when I recall her making them]). You know it’s over the top when it calls for a whole box of brown sugar…
A whole box of brown sugar!! I know I’d love it!
This is for Denise – use a different flavor chips or raisins instead.
cinnamon roll without icing or gooseberry pie
I’ve never had gooseberry pie! It sounds good!
I just go for it – you only live once and I’m at 77 now so it can’t hurt. I could not go without a piece of chocolate of some sort. I love them all and always have. I used to sneak pennies from my mother’s purse and walk down to the corner grocery store. All sorts of 2 for one back then. Ice cream was 10 cents so I didn’t have that very often. I still see some of those candies around but not at a penny each! Best wishes to you all
Aww, love those memories! I snuck quarters from my parents’ change jar as a kid to buy candy bars. You and I would get along fine!
Cream Cheese Danish, made with canned crescent rolls. Yummy! You can even add fruit to the filling to make it more healthy. lol
That sounds so good!
I like all sorts of cookies.
I do, too! Especially homemade chocolate chip. Yum!
we had an awesome piece of 3 tiered chocolate birthday cake this weekend – I make banana cake and lemon bars quite often!
Cookies cookies and more cookies!!!!!!! lol
Hi, I would have the Oatmeal Raisin Pecan cookies that my husband bakes, they are really good. Thank you for sharing your recipe with us. Have a great evening and a great week.
An apple fritter.
Recently I had a cup of coffee in my right hand and a piece of dark chocolate in my left and it sort of came to me that although I love chocolate I NEED coffee. 🙂
Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup Cookie with Chocolate Chips, thanks for recipe
I look forward to trying this recipe. I am fixing desserts every week for our church fish dinners until Easter. These will be a nice change for me and will go over well.
If I could have a sweet treat every weekend, it would be a fruit pie. Apple and strawberry rhubarb are favorites and I do make a lot of them every year.
Cookies are my go to sweet! This recipe fits my sweet tooth.
I love pecan pie.