Make a beautiful banana cake

Today we enjoyed a very tasty banana cake that brought back memories of days in New Zealand more than 30 years ago.

Sharon says: “No decent New Zealand kitchen was without a banana cake. So if a friend dropped in for a cup of tea there was always a slice of banana cake to go with it. I don´t know why they chose banana cakes but every New Zealand woman could make one without a recipe book.

“I, of course, need my trusty Edmonds recipe book, which is the NZ cookery bible, to make mine. It´s been so well used that it has lost its front cover and pages inside are taped in. But I did buy it back in 1974 when I arrived to live in New Zealand.

“Today we had some bananas that were ripe and needed to be used so a banana cake was the answer. I can´t remember when we last made one but we found the recipe in the book and got going. To make it even more delicious, we cut it in half and put in mashed mango slices with thick whipped cream. So I can count it as double in my daily fruit intake, with both bananas and mangoes.”

Here´s the recipe

Four ounces of butter
Six ounces of sugar
Two eggs
Two mashed bananas
One teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda
Two tablespoons of boiling milk
One teaspoon of baking powder
Eight ounces of flour

Now, the original instructions are quite specific – Cream butter and sugar, add eggs, mashed bananas then the bicarbonate of soda dissolved in boiling milk. Then separately mix the flour and baking powder together and add to the rest of the ingredients. Bake in two sandwich tins for 20 minutes. Fill with whipped cream and sliced bananas.

We forgot to look at the instructions and just put everything in the food processor with the plastic blade and whizzed it all together. We didn´t have two tins, so just used one fairly deep circular cake tin. It took over 30 minutes in our oven until the cake was cooked. And, of course, we used tinned mango instead of bananas in the whipped cream filling.

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©Phillip Bruce 2009.