Chocolate Chips & Tricep Dips: Try Something New Tuesday: Frozen Chocolate Banana Bites

For awhile now, I've seen different recipes floating around Pinterest for frozen chocolate-covered chunks of banana. As you all well know by now, I love chocolate! So these really piqued my interest. And since I have a mammoth-sized stockpile of chocolate chips from my couponing extravaganza last Christmas, and bananas are a staple here anyway, it seemed like the stars were aligning for me to give these a try.

After reading several recipes, I decided to try these a couple of different ways. Here's what I used.

First, I cut the bananas up into bite-sized pieces...about 1/2 inch each.

Then, I melted 1/2 cup of chocolate chips.

At first, I tried dipping the bananas into the melted chocolate with a fork.

This worked well at first, but the cool temperature of the bananas caused the chocolate to thicken making it increasingly more difficult. So then I tried just dumping a spoonful of chocolate over the banana pieces.

This worked okay, but it was difficult to make sure the bananas were evenly coated. And they weren't very pretty. Really I don't care how pretty my chocolate is, but since it was going on the blog that was kind of a bummer. Since I'm sure you have all been wowed by my cooking abilities thus far, I want to maintain my place on that pedestal. Ha!

I ended up using the entire half cup of chocolate chips on just one banana! So, for the next batch I added peanut butter. I melted 1/2 cup of chocolate chips with 1/4 cup peanut butter. This mixture was much easier to work with than the chocolate chips alone! I was able to go back to my fork dipping method, and it worked beautifully! I coated 2 bananas worth of bites in the chocolate/peanut butter mixture.

I put all the chocolate-covered bananas on a cookie sheet lined with wax paper.

Then I stuck them in the freezer for a couple of hours. Here's the finished product.

I let the kids sample them with me. They loved both varieties, although they had a slight preference for the plain chocolate. I think that's mostly because the chocolate was thicker which meant there was more chocolate on each bite. For the record, I think it's best to let these sit out for about 5 minutes before serving.