A low fat fresh fruit cake for summer

This was a cake inspired by having lots of delicious fresh fruit sitting around in my kitchen, begging to be used before it expired. I have mentioned before how I have a tendency to buy rather more fruit than I can reasonably eat and therefore end up turning it into cake and this was the case here. A single lonely overripe banana, a punnet of blueberries and some rather delicious 'donut' peaches were the culprits this time and I set out to make best use of them.

I recall reading somewhere that bananas can be used to replace some of the fat in a recipe and because this was the last cake I made on a day full of baking and I was slightly in awe of the amount of butter that I'd used, I decided to test this theory on this cake! Based on a two egg standard sort of cake mix I simply decided to halve the quantity of butter I'd normally put in and see what the result was!

Low fat banana, blueberry and peach cake
Ingredients
50g soft butter
80g caster sugar
20g icing sugar (I ran out of caster - you could use 100g caster sugar)
1 ripe banana (med-large)
2 medium eggs
140g self raising flour
80g fresh blueberries
1 large donut peach (not too ripe - you need to be able to slice it thinly)

Method

- Preheat oven to 180C/Gas 4. Grease and line a shallow tray-bake/roasting tin 9x6 1/2 inches (approx 23x16cm).

- Cream together the butter and sugar(s) and then add the banana in small chunks and beat this in (or mash the banana first and add it) and then add the eggs and mix well to combine.

- Add the flour and beat until well mixed. Pour half of this mixture into the lined tin and add the blueberries to the remaining half. Mix them in and then add this mixture to the tin, smoothing the top.

- Carefully slice the donut peach thinly and arrange the slices over the surface of the cake.

- Bake in the preheated oven for around 30-35 minutes (sorry, made this a while ago and forgot to note timings) until golden and a cake tester/wooden toothpick comes out clean, barring blueberry juice!

Allow to cool on a wire rack before slicing and enjoying, in the knowledge that it is full of fruit and lower in fat and therefore positively health food! So a big slice is definitely in order!

Very well balanced flavours, and the blueberries I used must have been better flavoured than some of the recent ones because when you bit into a blueberry it released a lovely burst of blueberry flavour, very pleasant against the subtle background banana flavour. The peach slices gave a lovely chewiness (in a good way) because they'd partly dried during the baking and this additional texture was a really good contrast to the soft moist cake.

I'm pleased to say that this met with universal approval at work and got lots of positive feedback. I'm sure this is partly because it's such an attractive cake visually, although the flavour and texture were really great too. I can honestly say that for this cake I really didn't notice that it was low fat in any way - there were lots of other things going on and there didn't seem to be any loss of texture either. This was a gamble that paid off, they quite often don't, so it's nice to have a success!