Banana Loaf Cake

I have been left with a HUGE bunch of over-ripe bananas on my hands. Why? Well, as you may or may not know, my fiance The Little Medic (TLM), is in his last year at medical school and is in the throes of revising for finals. Part of that revision is practising his skills, so we went and bought a whole heap of bananas for him to practise his suturing on. After dissecting one, it became apparent that banana skin is nothing like human skin and evidently useless to practise on. With neither of us overly keen on bananas, they were left in the fruit bowl.

I’ve never made a banana loaf before, something about the thought of it never appealed to me, but after seeing the banana goodies made by Astra Libris over at Food for Laughter I thought it would be the best way to put them to use. I used Nigella Lawson’s “Banana Bread” as a starting point, but didn’t have many of the right ingredients or right sized loaf tins, so I just muddled along. I didn’t have any greaseproof paper, but thankfully buttering and flouring the tins worked perfectly. I also forgot to look at the clock when I put it in – but I’m more of an instinctive than timer cook so it was OK – you can see the skewer holes in the picture below. The following recipe used up 3 large bananas (woop) and produced two of these loaves:

Ingredients

• 200 g raisins
• 175 g plain flour (I used self raising by mistake!)
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 125 g margarine
• 150 g caster sugar
• 2 eggs
• 300 g of overripe bananas (weight after skins removed)
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

How to make it

Preheat the oven to 170 C. Sift the flour, baking powder, bicarb and salt into a bowl. In a bigger bowl, pour in the butter (melted) and the sugar and beat them together. Add the eggs and the vanilla essence, then the mashed up bananas. Stir in the flour mixture. Pour into the tin/s (makes one big tin or two smaller tins worth – fill 2/3 full, no more because it puffs up a treat). Bake for 1 – 1/2 hours – it is ready when a skewer comes out clean.

It tastes really good, I had 2 slices for breakfast and another slice at lunchtime – eep. I imagine it could be really nice to fiddle around with – walnuts, honey, cinnamon…mmm.

p.s. wow what a difference taking pictures in the natural morning light makes! Alas, not all cooking is conducive to taking photos at the right time!