While I’m pretty good about eating most foods (despite my dislike for raisins and cucumbers), I can be oddly picky about certain things. Anyone who has ever had brunch with me knows about my “egg thing”. It’s not that I don’t like eggs, it’s just that on any day I can be pretty particular about how my eggs are prepared. For years I wouldn’t eat eggs Benedict because runny yolks freaked me out. These days how much a runny egg freaks me out depends on how I feel, which direction the sun is shining and if I can hear a crow in the distance. So I’ll order a poached egg and ask for the yolks a bit harder BUT not too hard because hard-boiled eggs also occasionally freak me out. It’s tough being me.
The other food that I have a challenging relationship with are bananas. I love having a banana at breakfast each morning whether it’s on toast, with my yogurt or just on my own. The problem is that for me bananas have such a limited shelf life. They’re never ripe enough when I get them from the supermarket, then there’s maybe a day or two when they’re optimal but as soon as the skin is super yellow and maybe starts to see a speck or two of black the banana is ruined for me. RUINED. At that point I either try to choke it back OR I throw them in my freezer for later use.
And by later use I mean… BANANA BREAD!
Banana bread was probably one of the first things I learned how to bake. Growing up we usually had everything around to make it and overall banana bread is dead easy to make. With that said while I’ve tried many recipes over the years, I’ve never found a recipe that was either spectacular or terrible… they’ve all been pretty good.
Enter this recipe by Nigel Slater for Chocolate Banana Cake. Yup, cake. But really folks, it’s banana bread… let’s not fool ourselves. Or at least that’s how I rationalized eating this for breakfast for a week.
So what makes this recipe so special? Well first of all it gives you measures in weights… which always gets me going. But that’s not it… the recipe uses only brown sugar which adds a great depth to the taste and gives it a hint of caramel flavour. It also calls for a whackload (official measurement) of chocolate pieces. If you eat the bread nearly fresh out the oven you find gooey nuggets of chocolate goodness. And if you eat it a few days later you end up with crunchy nuggets of chocolate. It’s a win-win situation really.
Nigel Slater’s Chocolate Muscovado Banana Cake
250 grams all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
125 grams softened butter
235 grams muscovado or dark brown sugar
3 to 4 ripe bananas
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 large eggs
100 grams dark chocolate
1. Heat the oven to 180 C (350 F). Line a standard-sized loaf pan with parchment paper. Sift the flour and baking powder together in a bowl.
2. In a large bowl, cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add the eggs to the butter and sugar one at a time until fully mixed in.
3. Peel the bananas and mash them in a small bowl. The bananas should be a bit lumpy. Stir in the vanilla.
4. Chop the chocolate finely and and mix it and the bananas into the butter and sugar. Carefully mix in the flour and baking powder.
5. Scrape the batter into the loaf pan and bake in the oven for 50 minutes, rotating the pan halfway through, until the cake is browned and a skewer inserted into the center comes out clean.
6. Remove the cake from the oven and let it cool on a rack for 15 minutes. Lift the bread/cake out of the pan using the parchment and allow it to cool completely on the rack. Enjoy!
Recipe via The Wednesday Chef
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