How To Make Chocolate Bread
Chocolate bread is divine. If you ask any of our staff they will tell you their favorite thing to make with Night Owl Chocolate are baked goods like bread, cookies, and cake. To bake bread, you will first need to gather the ingredients. We recommend doing this ahead of time so you can allow the ingredients to come to room temperature by leaving them out on the counter. Baking is more precise than cooking and the slightest deviation in temperature will ruin the bread. It’s quite similar to making chocolate actually.
The ingredients you’ll need for making one loaf of chocolate bread are 1 cup of all-purpose flour, 1 cup of sugar, 1/2 cup of unsweetened cocoa powder, 1 teaspoon of baking powder, a pinch of salt, 1 cup of milk, 1/2 cup of vegetable oil, 1 large egg, 1/2 a teaspoon of vanilla extract, 1 cup of Night Owl Chocolate Chips, 1 cup of chopped pecans (optional), and 1/2 a cup of softened butter.
There are basically two ways to make bread at home. One is to bake it in the oven where you would use a stand mixer or hand mixer to combine the ingredients. The other is to use a bread machine that will combine the ingredients for you. The first method is pretty self explanatory but if you choose the second method, you should note that bread machines differ in their capabilities to combine fruits, nuts, and other ingredients like chocolate. We recommend getting a bread machine that will allow you to gently incorporate these ingredients as some of them will crush them. The Panasonic SD-YD250 bread maker is an excellent choice. It has an alarm that will tell you when it’s time to add the chocolate so that they are incorporated gently into the dough. If you are using a stand mixer, make sure you add the chocolate last so they don’t get crushed. Don’t over mix either. Just enough so that everything is combined.
Preheat your oven. If you’re going to use a stand/hand mixer, first combine all the dry ingredients – flour, sugar, baking powder, cocoa, salt – then put the machine on low speed and put in the wet ingredients – milk, oil, eggs, and vanilla – slowly. After you see that the ingredients are combined, add in the chocolate chips. Place the batter into a buttered pan and bake for an hour until done. You will know it’s done if you stick a toothpick inside the bread and it comes out dry.
If you use a bread machine, all you have to do is combine the wet ingredients first and add the dry ingredients on top. You might want to add yeast into the batter too. But we recommend that you try the recipe first without yeast and if it doesn’t work as well, try with yeast the next time. Typically, bread machines need a bit of yeast to help with the consistency. There should be some settings on the machine where you could press to bake specialty bread, so choose that one for this recipe.
For the chocolate bread, serve with chocolate sauce or ice cream or eat it as is.
Besides the Panasonic SD-YD250 bread maker, there are other machines that are rated highly and handle chocolate, nuts, and fruit just as well. You can find more information and thorough bread machine reviews at Bread Machine Pros.