This seemed like an appropriately spooky sweet to post in the week leading up to Halloween. And surprise! It’s not a King Arthur Flour recipe (although my favorite baking site does make a cameo in the recipe). This one comes from Bake from Scratch, a print and digital recipe magazine. Their creations regularly pop up in my Instagram feed and quite frequently I add them to my Pinterest board, but this is the first one I’ve actually made.

What drew me to it is an ingredient mentioned in the name: Black Cocoa Banana Bread. No, not bananas but black cocoa. This product is something I purchased awhile back from King Arthur (I warned you) to make some lovely, fudgy Salty, Deep-Dark Chocolate Brownies from David Lebovitz. They’ve become one of our favorite renditions of that dessert due to their deep chocolate flavor. (Although some people–cough, cough, Mom and Dad–find the cocoa a bit too much, a bit too dark.)

Black cocoa is basically Dutch-processed cocoa on steroids. The extra alkalization is what gives it its incredibly dark color and softens the flavor a bit, reducing the bitterness. You’re probably already familiar with black cocoa, perhaps without knowing it, as it’s used in Oreos.

But back to the recipe. Like most banana breads, this is a fantastic way to use fruit that’s might soon teeter into being overripe. We eat a lot of bananas in our house, so that’s a common problem; it’s nice to have another option for making sure they don’t go to waste. If you’re torn between baking pans (it never seems like I have exactly the right sized loaf pan), I recommend going with the smaller one as long as it fits all the batter with space at the top to grow. My bread didn’t have quite the height I was hoping for, and it’s because I sized up a tiny bit too much. That didn’t affect the taste, though, which was full on banana and chocolate, with melty chocolate chips being the pièce (pièces?) de résistance.