Apple and Banana Muscovado Cakes

These little cakes are a Cake, Crumbs and Cooking original, inspired by the random selection of ingredients that I found myself with a few days ago....

I had an over-ripe banana (a common occurence in my house), some eggs that needed using up quickly, and some apples that were not particularly great for eating. It's the end of apple season (by a considerable margin...) and at the moment the quality is a bit mixed. These ones were ok, but some of them had been bruised and I thought baking with them would allow me to lose any soft bits when I chopped them up.

There isn't as much butter in this recipe as I would normally use for this quantity of eggs and flour, but that's because I took one 250g pack out of the fridge to soften, used 175g for a different recipe and the remaining 75g for these cakes. They didn't suffer for the lack of butter, there were plenty of other flavours going on and the banana added moisture too.

A simple glace icing topping was required to let the cakes shine, but then I thought it looked too plain so I scattered across some butterscotch chips I had, guessing that both banana, apple and muscovado would go with butterscotch. I'm pleased to say I wasn't wrong!

These were lovely and received very positive feedback at work too, which is always nice. Soft cake with a good muscovado and spice flavour, the banana adding moisture and the apples added a good crunch to the cakes as they were quite a crisp eating apple and didn't soften all that much during the cooking. A successful experiment.

Apple and Banana Muscovado Cakes
Ingredients
75g unsalted butter, softened
150g light muscovado sugar
1 ripe banana, mashed (about 100g mashed)
225g self raising flour
2 apples, chopped (unpeeled) mine weighed 240g before coring
3 medium eggs
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
generous 1/2 tsp mixed spice

Method

- Preheat the oven to 180C/Gas 4. Line a muffin tin with 14 cases (I have a 12 and 6 hole tin combination that will fit onto one layer in my oven)

- Cream the butter and sugar. It won't really go light and fluffy because there's not that much butter in there.

- Add the mashed banana, self raising flour, bicarb, mixed spice and eggs and beat well to combine.

- Fold in the chopped apple and divide between your cases.

- Bake for 25-30 minutes until golden brown and a cake tester comes out clean.

- Allow to cool on a wire rack.

For the icing: a simple glace icing made with about 200g icing sugar and water

I'm entering these into a number of blogging challenges:

Alphabakes, hosted this month by Ros at the More Than Occasional Baker (cohosted by Caroline of Caroline Makes) where the letter is A for Apple.

Kate of What Kate Baked is hosting Tea Time Treats this month (cohosted by Karen of Lavendar and Lovage) with a theme of cupcakes and muffins.

I'm entering them into the no-waste food challenge at Turquoise Lemons where this months theme is fruit (I was relieved to be rid of my apples and banana!) hosted by Elizabeth of Elizabeth's Kitchen.

I'm also entering them into Credit Crunch Munch, hosted by Fab Food 4 All (and Fuss Free Flavours) as I was using up eggs, apples and a banana that would otherwise have been wasted and this recipe is mercifully light on the expensive butter.