Chocolate Banana Stud Cake

In The Bread Bible, Rose has a wonderful bread named stud muffin. Now, maybe I just know people with low senses of humor, but after the first time I announced its name, I stopped. I started calling it Italian cheese bread or something. Now there's this stud cake. It's going to be referred to only as a chocolate banana cake in these parts.
This is a wonderfully moist chocolate cake with more than a hint of banana.  The secrets of its moistness are 1) ripe bananas and 2) sour cream. Are any of you old enough to remember the Chiquita Banana song?
It first came out in 1944, making it even older than I am. (But not older than Jim!) If you've ever heard tell of it, you know that you are not supposed to let bananas ripen in the refrigerator. This was imposed on me at an early age. In fact, I thought that something awful would happen if you did. My mother said, "Never put bananas in the refrigerator!!" I thought they somehow turned toxic. But really they just turn black. I had to put mine in the refrigerator for a few days to slow down the ripening, and that does make them turn slimy, black, and distasteful looking. But not toxic.

This is an easy, easy cake. We've been riding a midsummer wave of easy cakes lately, making me think it's about time to crack the whip and get back into some of the dread-inducing cakes. Not quite yet, though.
There are just a few steps.
Start with the standard cocoa/boiling water mixture, and let it cool.
Mix the dry ingredients together and add the butter.

Mash the bananas. They don't look black or distasteful once they're out of their skin.

Then add the cocoa mixture, bananas, sour cream, eggs, and vanilla.

Pour into prepared cake pan and bake. That isn't much harder than mixing a cake mix.

37 minutes in the convection oven at 325. I thought it might be a little underdone in the center, but it was perfect.

The ganache is standard for us all by now. Probably because of the heat, mine didn't set up very well, and was quite pourable. I put it in the refrigerator, which helped, but not a lot. Even after an hour, it was still the consistency of pudding.

If it weren't for the final step, this would certainly be on the Quick and Easy list. Maybe it would even be in the top ten Q&E. But the instructions for the painstaking decorating with a bag of chocolate chips take it out of that category.
I was actually kind of looking forward to this decorating, because it looked like it didn't require a lot of skill. The more I thought about it, though, the less I liked the idea of the cake completely covered with chocolate chips. I thought it would interfere too much with the other textures, and it would just take over the cake, so that all you'd remember would be a mouthful of crunchy chocolate chips.
So I decided to take the easy way, not the hard way.
I envisioned a really cool spiral pattern. But I got this.

I told Jim it wasn't what I had in mind. He told me that you couldn't see the pattern because the chips were too far away, and he volunteered to fill it in. I think he could tell I was about to get huffy, and perhaps do damage to the cake. We ended up with this:

At least you can tell it's a spiral. Unfortunately, now I have discovered that I'm no better at chip-decorating than I am at piping. Fortunately, neither of those skills is an essential desert-island talent. (To be honest, I can't start a fire without matches, build a raft, or sneak up on a bird and strangle it with my bare hands, all of which could come in handy if I were stranded on a desert island. I'm hoping it doesn't come to that).
Somehow I thought that this was going to be a banana cake with chocolate ganache, and I was really looking forward to that cake. It wasn't until I started reading the directions--always a good idea--that I realized it was a chocolate cake with a subtaste of bananas. I had my doubts about how that was going to work, and I had my doubts even when I tasted the first bite of cake. After the second bite, though, I decided that the flavors did work together after all. The ganache was delicious, but I think it made the cake too overwhelmingly chocolate. I also don't think I'd add the chocolate chips the next time. I actually enjoyed the textural interest they added, but, again, I thought it put the nicely meshed flavors of the chocolate and banana out of balance.

TASTING PANEL:

Mary: "Really delicious!"
Jim: "Moist, with a good chocolate flavor. I really liked the texture of the chocolate chips."
Karen: "Love the cake--so moist. I'd lose the chocolate chips, though."
Doug: "Nice and moist. Chocolate and bananas are a good flavor combination."