Banana bread is one of those comfort foods that are easy to whip up and delicious to eat. I have made my go-to Chocolate Chip Banana Bread for years (dare I say decades?) and with or without chocolate chips, it’s a winner.

Recently I started thinking about ways to embellish the original recipe. Sometimes, as a snack, I would slather some peanut butter on a slice of banana bread. The combination of banana + peanut butter + chocolate made perfect sense, but how to do it?

How to incorporate peanut butter?

On my first test, I added peanut butter to the batter. While it imparted peanut butter flavor, it didn’t work out as I imagined. The bread ended up being a little dry overall and not very luscious.

My next idea was to create a peanut butter layer within the banana bread. In my research I came across Delish’s Buckeye Banana Bread and found my answer for the filling. Peanut butter alone would not do it but combining it with cream cheese, a little sugar, and an egg was perfect. It created a creamy layer that held together inside of the banana bread. This was exactly what I wanted.

A couple of helpful tips

It’s important to have the cream cheese very soft and at room temperature to incorporate it well with the other filling ingredients, especially if you are mixing by hand. If you don’t, you will have cream cheese lumps throughout your filling.

Don’t skip the step of dusting the chocolate chips in flour. If you don’t, you won’t have chocolate chips throughout your banana bread. Instead, you will have a layer of chocolate at the bottom of the bread that may end up sticking to the pan.

So next time you have a hankering for banana bread, try this recipe and add a layer of creamy peanut buttery goodness. I think you’ll really like it!

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