Making Stuff 16: Chocolate Banana Cake

~ Smelly Socks and Garden Peas

I haven’t done a making stuff post for a while, but two are probably going to come along at once.

The first week of February was Children’s Mental Health week in the UK and so school gave us two Zoom free days. Mostly, that meant the boys watched a lot of TV and played on their screens with a little bit of mindful colouring. At the same point though, we were suffering from a serious banana backlog. Some how we had a whole mountain of them that were rather brown and himself and large boy were refusing to eat them.

There’s only one reasonable solution to that sort of problem: cake.

Recipe

I don’t hold with babbling on about ingredients, techniques or why a recipe is a good idea before diving straight in, so here it is: BBC Good Food Chocolate Banana Cake.

Ingredients

  • 100ml sunflower oil, plus extra to grease
  • 175g caster sugar
  • 175g self-raising flour
  • ½ tsp bicarbonate of soda
  • 4 tbsp cocoa powder
  • 100g chocolate chips or chunks
  • 175g very ripe bananas
  • 3 medium eggs, 2 separated
  • 50ml milk

For the topping

  • 100g milk chocolate
  • 100ml soured cream
  • handful dried banana chips, roughly chopped

Method

  • STEP 1
    Heat oven to 160C/140C fan/gas 3 (or with my bonkers oven gas 4). Grease and line a 2lb loaf tin with baking parchment (allow it to come 2cm above top of tin, seriously you’re going to need that frilly bit). Mix the sugar, flour, bicarb, cocoa and chocolate in a large bowl. If a small child does this, clean up the fine powder covering all the surfaces.
  • STEP 2
    Mash the bananas in a bowl and stir in the whole egg plus 2 yolks, followed by the oil and milk. Ignore the fact that it looks “like a big pile of sick” (according to small boy). Beat the egg whites until stiff. Quickly stir the wet banana mixture into the dry ingredients, stir in a quarter of the egg whites to loosen the mixture, then gently fold in the rest. Gently scrape into the tin and bake for 1 hr 10-15 mins, or until a skewer inserted comes out clean.
  • STEP 3
    Cool in the tin on a wire rack. To make the icing, melt the chocolate and soured cream together in a heatproof bowl over a pan of barely simmering water. Chill in the fridge until spreadable. Remove cake from tin, roughly swirl icing over and scatter with the banana chips or white chocolate chips.

The results

Well frankly, it was delicious. Small boy is well known for his aversion to anything with any sort of icing (butter, royal, cream cheese are all rejected), but he loved this. I was a bit concerned about how well it would keep with sour cream out of the fridge, but I needn’t have worried it was all gone in 48 hours.

Published by Smelly Socks and Garden Peas

53 thoughts on “Making Stuff 16: Chocolate Banana Cake”

  3. This looks divine. I do make a chocolate cake, but I’ve never made one using bananas. I think my boys will love this, so I’m going to give it a go!

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  9. Hahah I
    Love the way you don’t “babble on a lot about recipes and techniques” that sort of thing drives me nuts when I’m trying to get to the recipe that I gave just googled up – this looks good, my oven which has been on the blink for over twelve months is being replaced Monday so I’m busting to try some baking …then again it is dangerous as then I have to try the baking by eating it and then my ass expands – which is why I wasn’t a rush to fix the oven when it broke . Crap I’m babbling – sorry.

    Liked by 1 person

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  15. OMG, my stomach just wants to dive into my screen now to eat that banana cake of yours. Haha, it looks SO good, I definitely want to try it out~ Thanks for sharing!

    Liked by 1 person

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  23. Mmmm I love the look of the gooey icing. I’m glad small boy enjoyed despite his usual aversion to icing. I’m with you in not liking banana bread but chocolate banana cake sounds pretty tasty, and reasonably healthy. xx

    Liked by 1 person

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