Chocolate, Peanut Butter, and Banana. Are there any three ingredients more perfect for each other? It’s like the holy trinity of baked goods. When thinking of a recipe using Chocolate Peanut Butter Reese Spreads, adding banana was a no-brainer, but I was having trouble deciding how to best combine them in a recipe. I was telling my niece, who blogs at Rain City Vegan, about Reese Spreads and she came up with the brilliant idea to make a marbled banana bread with it.

She suggested taking a portion of the banana bread batter and mixing it with the spread, then putting alternating spoonfuls of light and dark batter into the pan, and finishing it off by swirling it around with a knife. I loved this idea! I’d never made a marbled cake or loaf before, and it sounded like fun, so I thought I’d give it a go.

It turned out so well! I was really happy with it, and very thankful that my niece had suggested it. And I’d just like to point on that I’m far too young to have an adult niece. Or kids, for that matter. Who are these little people running around calling me “mom”?  I’m not sure how any of this happened.

Here are two out of three of my kids (I don’t know where the third one ran off to) enjoying my marbled banana bread. Cole liked it so much he tried to steal the remainder of the loaf when he posed for this photo — not that there was much left of the loaf anyway. We ate it up pretty quickly!

I cut out about half of the sugar from my usual banana bread recipe, because the Reese Spreads and ripe bananas add a lot of sweetness already.  You could even cut it out all together and replace with a sugar substitute, like Splenda or Xylitol, if you want to reduce the sugar even more. This loaf was a delicious treat. I know my kids are going to be asking for banana bread with “swirly stuff” in it from now on. There’s no going back. I think I’ve bumped us into a new banana bread bracket.