marbled banana bread

Less than a weekafterI delivered the ostensibly completed manuscript for that my second cookbook (just 40 days now!), I received an email from someone was looking for a recipe for a chocolate-vanilla marble cake like the one her grandmother had made, one that had great texture and wasn’t too sweet. She said that no recipe she’d tried had achieved this, and could I help? I became obsessed; I loved the idea and I fiddled until I came up with a marble cake I loved, moist, deeply chocolaty in the dark swirls, but no throwaway blandness in the light ones… and then I added it to the book. Editorslovethis, by the way, almost as much as mine loved the ten recipes I swapped in in December and the three in January, and the introduction that I didn’t write until February. Seriously, just let me know if you ever want me to write that How Not To Write A Book Book. What a tease, however, that this isn’tthatmarble cake. (That one is really good though! I thought I’d hand it off to friends and my family basically blockaded the door.) (Geez, Deb, stop rubbing it in.) What I wanted to tell you today is what happened after I figured out how I wanted to marble the cake, which is that I found it so much fun, I couldn’t stop. I started marblingeverything. Marbled chocolate graham crackers. Marbled gingerbread bars. And then one day I even made marbled banana bread and I shared it on Instagram Stories and I don’t think I have ever received so many requests for a recipe. At my typically snail-like pace of output, this brings us up to today. Banana bread is perfect fall/back-to-schoolfood anyway, can we pretend I “meant” to do that? And this version, which is50% this jacked-up classic(my favorite) and50% this double-dark chocolate version(seemingly everyone else on earth’s favorite) is thus the literal definition of “best of both worlds.” I know for a fact that all of our weekends will be better with this in it.