What do you do when you’ve got bananas going brown? Make banana bread of course!
So I did.
I went to google for a recipe and went for the first BBC good food one I found. Perhaps I should have gone for the second – it was the Mary Berry recipe!! Oh well, I think this one by John Barrowman did OK. For me the BBC Good Food website is a great resource – the recipes always turn out well and are easy to follow, and with special videos to show you techniques you can learn new things.
Now I don’t have silly things like Buttermilk lying around as well as ripe bananas.. so I used the milk plus lemon juice mix recommended in the recipe, which looked disgusting and lumpy, but the cake has turned out alright.
I also pimped my cake with dark chocolate chunks – for me banana cake isn’t right without dark chocolate, the very first recipe I had was off the back of a Bournville packet!
Now I know my oven runs hot but still I managed to get a bit of a ‘brown’ crust on the loaf whilst the middle was still fairly liquid. My top tip for cakes is to use a skewer to see if the middle is cooked or not – no one wants uncooked egg…
What you’ll need:
285g/10oz plain flour
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
½ tsp salt
110g/4oz butter, plus extra for greasing
225g/8oz caster sugar
2 free-range eggs
4 ripe bananas, mashed
85ml/3fl oz buttermilk (or normal milk mixed with 1½ tsp lemon juice or vinegar, I used the lemon juice method)
1 tsp vanilla extract
Chocolate chunks to pimp your cake 🙂
How to make:
Preheat the oven to 180C (or if its mine more like 160C!).
Sift the flour, bicarbonate of soda and salt into a large mixing bowl.
In a separate bowl, cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy.
Add the eggs, mashed bananas, buttermilk, chocolate chunks and vanilla extract to the butter and sugar mixture and mix well. Fold in the flour mixture.
Grease a 20cm x 12.5cm/8in x 5in loaf tin and pour the cake mixture into the tin.
Transfer to the oven and bake for about an hour, or until well-risen and golden-brown. Mine needed 1 hour 15 minutes and I checked that it was done using a metal skewer inserted into the middle of the cake – when it comes out clean you know its cooked.
Remove from the oven and cool in the tin for a few minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack to cool completely before testing serving 🙂
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