I am a self confessed cake addict. The first thing I did after my final exams last year as a reward was to go and buy myself a nice cupcake. Unfortunately others don't recognise cake as a food group and once an ex-boyfriend through out my 2 drawers full of mini-rolls as he was worried that I would become malnourished. It was a traumatic experience. In an effort to avoid that ever happening again I had to disguise my love of cake with fruit and vegetables. Carrot cake was my first love until a friend made me a banana bread.
It was moist, bananaey and just 100% cakey goodness. She used the Hummingbird Bakery recipe and it was pretty close to perfection. Unfortunately pretty close to perfection is just not enough for me, so I tweaked it... then I added nutella because the only thing that is better than perfection is perfection with nutella.
Ingredients (makes a whole loaf)
5-6 very ripe bananasJar of nutella
2 eggs
270g soft brown sugar
280g plain flour
2 tsp baking powder
1" grated ginger
1 heaped teaspoon ground cinnamon
Half a clove of grated nutmeg
150g unsalted butter
How to...
1. Mush the bananas in a big mixing bowl.
2. Melt the butter and preheat the oven to 170C (gas mark 3).
3. Put all the other ingredients except the nutella in with the bananas and mix well. There is no need to be delicate about this and add things in any order, just mix it up.
4. Grease a loaf tin with some butter and dust with flour.
5. Scoop all the mixture into the loaf tin.
6. Use a teaspoon to drop blobs of nutella throughout the mixture. This gives lovely gooey blobs of nutella in the baked loaf. Remember the rule; 1 spoon in cake, 1 spoon in face.
7. Bake for around an hr (it might need 10 mins more or less). When its cooked if you stab it with skewer it will come out clean.
8. Allow the cake to cool and either eat it all yourself or cut it into little squares and share.
Whilst baking I was listening to... Vanilla Twilight by Owl City
