Chocolate Walnut Banana Bread with Salted Caramel Dipping Sauce

When I was a little girl my cousin would often babysit us when my mother had a late night out.  If we couldn’t sleep she would bring us into the kitchen and make us warm milk served with a little snack.  Her father makes the absolute best chocolate walnut banana bread and so the other night when we were craving a satisfying bedtime snack we pulled out the recipe card and started baking.

This is a very simple recipe and turns out great every time.

1/2 cup butter

1 cup sugar

2 eggs

3 tablespoons water

1 3/4 cups flour

1teaspoon baking powder

3 mashed bananas

1/2 t salt

1/2 cup chopped walnuts

3/4 cups chocolate morsels

We began by creaming the butter and sugar before we added the eggs and water.

We sifted together the flour, baking powder and salt and then added it to the butter and sugar mix.

In the meantime we mashed three very ripe bananas and added them to our mix.

We added the walnuts and chocolate morsels and combined to the batter.

We baked the banana bread in a 9×5 loaf pan (greased) at 325 for about one and a half hours.  We checked on ours after 80 minutes to be safe.

 As good as the bread is, we wanted this nighttime snack to be a little extra special so we opted to make a salted caramel dipping sauce.

While the bread was cooling we placed 1/2 stick of butter, 1 cup of sugar and 1/3 cup of maple syrup into a small saucepan.  We placed this over a low flame and stirred constantly.

When the mixture was liquid we took it off the flame.  We then took 3/4 cup of milk and mixed 2 tablespoons of corn starch into it.  We also stirred in 1 teaspoon of vanilla and 1 and a half teaspoons of sea salt.

The maple syrup and sea salt made this caramel dipping sauce luxurious.   What better to go with chocolate walnut banana bread!