Little tiny bananas...
Normal sized bananas...
Big massive bananas..
and horrible ooozy brown bananas...
With all these bananas kicking about (the reason I've got so many bananas is cos I bought some bananas and then I forgot I'd bought some and bought some more (a bit like the sausages of 2010)) I decided to bake some banana based products.
Banana and Chocolate cake
I decided to make this cake on a whim, I didn't really have a recipe to base it on, I just knew I had lots of bananas and that I wanted to use my whisk, and it was a colleagues birthday. It turned out to be the best cake I've ever made. Not modest - but true!
You will need
3 bananas - the browner the better
170g of self raising flour
170g caster sugar (With this I realised I didn't have enough caster sugar half way through so I went to put in some brown (muscovado?) sugar I found at the back of my cupboard but it had been there so long as I tipped the pot up it all fell into the mixture in on big chunk so I had to scoop some out with my bare hands, so in fact I don't know how much sugar I put in, I'd say probs about 217 grams)
2 eggs
170grams of butter
half a big chocolate bar broken up into chunks
How to make it:
Put everything into a bowl (except the chocolate) and whisk it up! Once whisked stir in the chocolate and put into a cake tin then bake for 1 hour and ten mins on 180.
I wish I still had this cake to eat.
When other people began to hear about my excess of bananas other recipes were suggested to me.
This one is called
Banana, museli and oat muffins
These are slightly more complicated that putting everything into a bowl and whisking it up but just as delicious (nearly) so perservere. I must credit a lovely lady called Helen for the recipe who also likes riding her bike.
This recipe should make around 20 muffins.
300 g self raising flour
1 tsp bicarb
100g of any type of sugar (I used the brown sugar that fell into the bowl in the above recipe, not the stuff I took back out the bowl it was just from the same bag)
50 g porridge oats, plus 1 tbsp for topping
1tsp cinnamon or a bit more if you want as cinnamon is super tasty (and good for fat burning)
3 bananas - the browner the better
1 mug of half museli, half sultanas
280ml milk with a splash of lemon juice in it
5 tbsp olive oil
2 egg whites. (Someone to whom I gave this recipe insisted that they'd never seen eggs in a muffin recipe so stubbornly left them out - their muffins were NOT NICE)
Tip the flour and bicarb into a large bowl.
Put1 tbsp of the sugar in a separate cup all by itself then mix remainder of the sugar with the flour and 50g oats, add the cinnamon and make a hole in the centre.
In a separate bowl, mash the bananas until they look like baby sick
Stir in the milk, oil and egg whites into the mashed banana until evenly combined.
Then pour the liquid mix into the hole and stir quickly and sparingly with a wooden spoon. We got 3 new wooden spoons for Christmas - what a treat!
The mix will look lumpy and may have the odd fleck of flour, but dont' be tempted to over mix. (Helen's top tip there)
Chuck in the museli and raisins and give it one more stir.
Then divide mix into muffin cases and sprinkle tops with porridge oats and the sugar that you put in the cup all by itslef before. Bake for 18 - 20 mins or until risen and dark golden.
Here is a story which I remembered at the beginning of the week and has been making me laugh ever since.
On a french exchange trip whilst at school (when none of us could speak any French) a good friend of mine (who still can't speak any French) stayed with a family (to whom she could speak no French).
One evening to avoid the family she decided to have a bath. She ran a lovely deep bath and relaxed in it for a good while.
On getting out the bath and going to empty it, she realised that she couldn't get the plug out.
By this time she'd already been in the bathroom a fair while so the family were starting to puzzle.
As she could speak no French and was a little scared of the family she didn't want to go out the bathroom to ask them how to remove the plug. She hastily scoured the bathroom for a tool with which to empty the bath but found nothing.
In desperation she took the top off the mouthwash bottle and emptied the entire bath into the sink with it.
Hahahahaaa.
