Chocolate Banana Cake

Also known as 'Disorganised singleton going away for a week and coming back to too many ripe bananas' cake. Well, you know what I'm trying to say! I was away for a week at a conference for work and even though I knew months ago that it was happening I was still disorganised enough to have lots of food left in the fridge and bananas in the fruit bowl before I left. Luckily, using up over-ripe bananas isn't too much of a hardship when you've got a delicious chocolate cake recipe like this one!

The thing that always surprises me about this cake, every time I make it, is just how huge it really is! Normally for loaf cakes baked in a 2lb loaf tin, I would just cut them into slices. For this cake I need to halve it lengthways first, as shown below, otherwise the slices would be enormous. It doesn't seem to have excessive quantitites of any particular ingredient though. Must be magic....

Chocolate is one of my very favourite things, so I'm going to send this cake over to Poornima at Tasty Treats, a lovely new food blog. Check it out if you haven't already discovered it. She's hosting an event called 'For the love of chocolate'. Sounds perfect to me.

The recipe comes from Sue Lawrence, whose recipes I really enjoy making. They always seem to work for me, which can't be said of every food writer! The original recipe has a rather delicious crumble topping, but I left it off this version for ease and speed.

Chocolate Banana Cake

Makes 22 pieces

Ingredients

175g butter

175g soft light brown sugar

85g dark chocolate

285g self-raising flour

1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda

2 large eggs, beaten

2 small ripe bananas, mashed

Method

- Preheat the oven to 160C/Gas 3. Line the base and sides of a 2lb loaf tin (907g)

- Melt the butter and sugar in a saucepan over a low heat. Then add the chocolate and melt that too, being careful not to let the pan get too hot.

- Remove from the heat and sift in the flour and bicarbonate of soda. Mix well together.

- Beat in the eggs and fold in the mashed bananas.

- Spoon into the tin and place in the preheated oven for about 1 hour 10 minutes, but check after 1 hour until a skewer inserted into the middle comes out clean.

- Allow to cool in the tin for 30-45 minutes, then loosen and transfer to a wire rack to finish cooling completely.

You can see from the picture above that I've slightly over-cooked mine - the edges are slightly dry, but it didn't matter - it still tasted great! The banana flavour is surprisingly strong, but really good. An excellent cake to have with a cup of tea or coffee as a mid-morning or mid-afternoon treat.