Chocolate-Cherry Skillet Banana Bread

A classic banana bread never needs tweaking but it doesn’t hurt to give it a summer spin with fresh cherries…and chocolate makes everything better.  Unlike other people whose summer season is dictated by the beginning and end of the school year, since we don’t have children, our season follows the dates on the calendar pretty closely. So when I see “end-of-summer” ads and back-to-school pictures on my Facebook feed in the middle of August, I’m thrown off a little. Right around the time kids return to school my husband and I take off on a Europe vacation and return as summer truly comes to a close. This is the week that we would normally be jetting off for our late summer adventure but we will be home this year. We had been counting on spending a few weeks in St. Jean Cap Ferrat, our favorite spot on the Côte d’Azur (featured here and here) but in July plans had to change, delaying our  French Riviera fix for another year. My husband is especially disappointed as these plans have been replaced by something significantly less fun but we are looking forward to other things to do before the year is over. It’s been a busy travel year up to this point and we managed a trip to Spain and France in June before we realized our late-summer plans would change so it hasn’t been all bad. Speaking of late-summer if you can still find fresh cherries at the market this seasonally-inspired banana bread would be a tasty last hurrah. I must have half a dozen recipes for banana bread in this blog and I love them all –classic, vegan, Nutella-laced, corn bread style–there’s one to suit every palate. This one combines a few loves–chocolate, cherries and my current favorite method of baking banana bread in a skillet, throwing in a little corn meal for added texture. This was not a recipe that came out of brainstorming for something new. If you look closely at these images you’ll see that the cherries were a little past their best. I couldn’t let them go to waste and I had overripe bananas that begged to be used after one of our trips so this recipe was born. We enjoyed a few slices and shared the rest with my brother-in-law. I heard through the grapevine later that he ate this batch in virtually one sitting. While I don’t recommend binging on banana bread, I’ll take it as a sign that this is a keeper of a recipe.