BANANA, DATE AND HONEY DRIZZLE CAKE

I have made a few different banana cakes over the years but this is one I keep coming back to.  The recipe is in a leaflet that came with a special offer that was in Sainsbury’s about six years ago.  A twin pack of Lurpak butter and a free loaf tin for £3.  I got two of them for myself and three more for colleagues at work.  The tins were of really good quality and understandably they soon sold out.

It’s the honey in this cake that makes it so good I think.  There is some honey in the mixture and you drizzle some more over it when it comes out of the oven and is still warm, much like a lemon drizzle cake.

Mine was a clear honey but still quite thick so in order to make it easy to drizzle I put the spoonful required in a small ramekin and into the oven when the cake came out and the oven was turned off.  After about five minutes the cake was still very warm and the honey was runny enough for drizzling.

As I was in the mood for using up a few storecupboard bits and pieces I used half dates and half sultanas this time, which worked very well.  The walnuts were some of our foraged walnuts from this autumn but pecans would be just as good instead if you had those already.

I have often pondered when a loaf is not a loaf but a cake.  To my mind a loaf is something you would spread butter on and a cake is something that doesn’t need any butter.  So although this cake is baked in a loaf tin and is described as a loaf, to me it is definitely a cake.  It’s lovely and moist and keeps really well for a few days.

The recipe used to be on the Lurpak website but it no longer is so I have given my version of it here.

Ingredients

2 medium ripe bananas, peeled

200g self raising flour

160g butter at room temperature, or spreadable butter 

80g caster sugar

2 tblsp clear honey

2 eggs

80g chopped dates (or half dates, half sultanas)

40g chopped walnuts (or pecans, possibly even brazil nuts)

1 tblsp extra honey for drizzling, warmed 

Method

Grease the tin and line it with greaseproof paper or baking parchment, or use a paper liner.

Preheat the oven to 160°C, 140°fan, Gas mark 3.

Put the bananas into a large bowl and mash them.  Add the other ingredients (except for the dates and nuts) and whisk together with an electric whisk until well combined.

Stir in the dates and nuts.  Pour or spoon the mixture into the tin and bake for 1 hour or until done (mine took 1 hour and 5 minutes).

When the cake is out of the oven, make a few holes in the top with the skewer and drizzle the warmed tablespoon of honey over the cake whilst it is still warm.  

Leave to cool in the tin before turning out.

Cuts into 10-12 slices.

OAT AND GINGER TRAYBAKE

It was Nick’s birthday the other day and I was just dying to bake a cake.  Any excuse.  Unfortunately he’s a bit fussy when it comes to cake and has definite likes and dislikes, which can narrow my choice somewhat.  Ginger cake is one of his few favourites.

So I spent ages leafing through my embarrassingly huge collection of recipe books to find the perfect ginger cake but most recipes were either too fussy and complicated for a man that just likes a simple ginger cake, or they were of the gingerbread variety that should have been made days before to enable the stickiness and flavours to develop.

With an enormous pile of books on the bedside table as I sipped my morning tea (retirement, I can recommend it heartily), I settled on a recipe in the gorgeous book, “Simply baking” by Sybil Kapoor.  This book is stuffed full of well tried and tested recipes from various kitchens of the National Trust and I really can’t understand why I hadn’t noticed this one before.

It’s described as a fusion of gingerbread, parkin and flapjack and I would say that’s very accurate.  It had the treacly gingeryness of gingerbread, the oatyness of parkin and the chewyness of flapjack.  Truly a match made in heaven and an absolute hit with Nick who thought he’d died and gone to heaven. Highly praised and very highly recommended.

In fact, it beat the Bonfire Night Parkin that I made for a large gathering last weekend well into second place.  The recipe I used for that was traditional but the end result was nowhere near as nice as this.

(You can no longer see this recipe and photo online as the website has, like so many, morphed into something else!)

Ingredients

150 ml milk (I used semi-skimmed as that’s what we have)

40g black treacle

80g salted butter

55g plain flour

1½ tsp ground ginger (Nick reports that this is plenty)

½ tsp ground cinnamon

½ tsp bicarb

115g light muscovado sugar

40g dark muscovado sugar

100g porridge oats

Method

In a small saucepan, put the treacle, butter and milk and heat gently until the butter is melted, stirring every so often.  Set aside to cool slightly.

Grease and line a traybake tin that measures roughly 18 x 28 cm.  Preheat the oven to 150°fan / gas mk 2½.

Sift the flour, bicarb and spices into a large bowl.  Add the oats and sugar and mix well.  Add the treacle mixture and mix again to combine thoroughly.

Pour into the tin and bake for 45 minutes.  Cool in the tin.

Cuts into 8-12 slices, depending on how small or large you like your slices.

GLUTEN FREE PARTY CAKE

You may be forgiven for thinking that no baking has been going on in our house for the last two months but this is certainly not the case!  I can’t really explain why I’ve let the blog lapse as baking is very much a part of my life and indeed very good therapy in what is turning out to be my own personal “annus horribilis”. 

Anyway, I feel the blog is rested for long enough and it’s time to catch up.  I hate it when blogs just end, as if the writer died or just evaporated.  I like to know if someone has decided to give up.  No such thing here!

Friends of ours who lived over near Richelieu for several years have recently sold up, packed up and moved back to the UK.

It was family ties that took our friends back to the UK and we’re very sorry to see them go.  A leaving party was arranged once the vans were all packed and the legal formalities complete.  I offered to provide the cake, which needed to be gluten free.

I used an adaptation of a recipe that I’ve used several times before, which is basically a Victoria sponge recipe from Hannah Miles’ book , “the gluten free baker”. This time I baked it in a ring tin, which makes a cake which goes a long way in a crowd and cuts easily into small, manageable slices.  Most people don’t want a huge slab of cake after they’ve filled up on other party food, but everyone is usually pleased to have a little slice to go with the speeches and toasts.  This one worked well as the crumb was not too crumbly and the slices were easy to pass around and hold in the hand.

Finding something to decorate it with proved too much of a challenge in France. I couldn’t find any appropriate cake decorations as such and house warming cards do not seem to exist here, so I used one I had in stock*, cut it up and glued the pictures onto wooden sticks to decorate the cake, after icing it with simple icing and dotting a few halves of glacé cherries and bits of chopped almond on the top.  The candle holder in the middle was a 1€ bargain from a vide grenier this summer and fits perfectly in the hole in the middle of the cake. 

With the appropriate decoration this large gluten free cake lends itself to any and every party or occasion.

Ingredients

185g softened butter

185g caster sugar

4 eggs

200g ground almonds

125g gluten free self raising flour

150ml crème fraîche

1 tsp almond essence

Method

Preheat the oven to 180°C/160°fan/gas mk 4.  Grease and flour a large ring or Bundt tin.

Put the butter and sugar in a large mixing bowl and beat or whisk until light and fluffy.

Add the eggs one at a time and beat well with each addition.

Add the other cake ingredients and fold in gently until evenly combined.

Spoon the mixture into the prepared tin and bake for 40-50 minutes until the cake is firm and golden and passes the skewer test.  Remove from the oven, turn out and cool on a wire rack.

Make an icing using about 150g icing sugar, blended with lemon juice to the consistency of double cream.  Pour over the cake and allow to run down the sides.  Decorate as desired.

Serves 12-15 slices.

*Birthday cards and other greeting cards are incredibly expensive in France so I usually stock up on a random selection of all types of card in the UK and bring them with me.

PICNIC PIES

With the bank holiday weekend coming up and hopefully some good weather I thought it was time that I posted about these lovely little pies.  I first saw the recipe in a blog called “Time to cook online” which comes from one of my favourite former Great British Bake Off contestants, a lady called Mary-Anne Boermans.  It’s a great blog and you can see the details of this recipe here.

These are simple little pies, made with a shortcrust bottom, a puff pastry lid and a filling of egg and bacon.

I have made them several times but I have to say that the first attempt was a complete disaster. 

Anne-Marie made hers in mini cake tins.  Having some very similar tins in my pantry and feeling confident I went ahead and made some pies to the recipe with the addition of a few cooked mushrooms in the filling.  They looked good but when I turned them out the bottoms were miserably undercooked and in fact they were actually raw.  The filling is pre-cooked but there is nothing at all pleasant about raw pastry.  Yuk.

Which just goes to show that, as we all knew, size does matter.  I think my tins were just that little bit deeper than the ones she used and therefore the bottoms were not cooked.

So undeterred and not to be defeated, I put my thinking cap on and remembered the brand new Yorkshire pudding tins that I bought to make mini pies and quiches last year.  Bingo!

The pies were lovely.  Nice crisp pastry, a tasty filling, just the right size for one each, can be served on a plate or munched on in the hand without risk of them falling apart.  Perfect for a picnic or a smart lunch with a side salad and a glass of something nicely chilled.

This is my adaptation but I urge you to refer to the original post and peruse the blog for other recipes.  You would not be disappointed.

Ingredients

1 pack of ready made, ready rolled puff pastry

1 pack of ready made, ready rolled shortcrust pastry

1 pack of lardons

4 large mushrooms, chopped

4 eggs

chopped fresh parsley

Method

Preheat the oven to 200° C / 180° fan / gas mk 6.  Grease a four hole Yorkshire pudding tin.

Fry the lardons and mushrooms until nicely browned, especially the mushrooms which should not be too watery.

Using a suitable sized jam jar, cut circles of the shortcrust pastry to line the tin and slightly smaller ones from the puff pastry for the lids.  Use the shortcrust circles to line the tin.

Arrange the cooked bacon and mushrooms on the pastry, making a well in the centre to take the egg.

Break one egg into a small cup and pour out some of the white.  There is unlikely to be enough room for all of the white in these shallow tins and this avoids overflowing and a bit of a mess.  Drop the egg into the well.  Add chopped parsley and season with salt and pepper.

Place a puff pastry circle on top and pinch the edges together to seal the lid to the bottom.  Brush with beaten egg.  Bake for 20 minutes or until the pastry is golden brown.

Serves 4.

PEANUT BUTTER AND JELLY CAKE

I offered to make a cake for a friend’s birthday party and decided that it needed to be quite a large cake due to the number of people who might be coming to the do.  A Bundt cake was ideal.

It also needed to be a bloke’s cake, nothing too girly or frilly, and the idea of a peanut butter cake sprang to mind.  The absence of any topping that might melt or slide off in transit on a very warm summer’s afternoon in the Loire Valley was also a consideration, so a light dusting of icing sugar was perfect.

A quick look on Google led me to this cake on the DollyBakes blog – peanut butter and jelly cake.  It was, as I expected from Rachel’s recipes, a great success. 

I forgot to take pictures of the cake when it was cut which would show how the inside looked and how perfectly the jelly was distributed but, if you look at the original blog post, it turned out exactly like that!  The crunchy peanut butter gave just the right amount of crunch and flavour and the jelly was a nice little surprise in every slice.

I followed the recipe precisely, using blackberry jelly as the jam and taking care to keep it away from the edges of the cake as suggested.  I have experienced before the amazing effect that jam has in gluing the cake to the tin if it gets too close to the edge!

My Bundt tin was just the right shape and size for the cake to accommodate a mansize candle in the middle too.  So we all wished Simon a Happy Birthday and after he’d blown out the candle the cake was cut easily into a huge number of generous slices.

Definitely a good one for a crowd.  To see the recipe, click here.

Cuts into at least 15 slices.

BLUEBERRY CHEESECAKE

I don’t make cheesecake very often, once a year if that, but I can’t think why I don’t make more of them.  Except that of course they are not on our diet sheet.  I dread to think how many zillions of calories there are in a single slice.

I recently went on a blueberry picking trip with some friends and came back with 4½ kilos of the most gorgeous, plump and tasty blueberries, most of which are now in the freezer.  With other friends coming round for a bbq I knew exactly what I should do with the ones I kept back.  Cheesecake.

It was hardly any effort to make and delicious.  I used a recipe from the Delicious Magazine website that you can see here, except that as usual I adapted it to what I had in stock.  Here in France you can get digestive biscuits, called Sablés Anglais, but I have never seen gingernuts in the shops, and I didn’t have a vanilla pod but used vanilla paste which I brought back from the UK.

I even made a blueberry compote to serve with it.  You can see the recipe for that here.  As I was making it, it didn’t seem to be thickening much and I wondered when to stop cooking so that I ended up with coulis not jam.  Jam it was.  But with a bit of a stir It still worked when dolloped onto a slice of the cake.

Definitely a recipe I will do again and easily adaptable for other fruits I think.

Ingredients

50g butter, melted

200g ginger biscuits, crushed (or digestives)

1 vanilla pod (or one teaspoon vanilla bean paste)

400g mascarpone

350g cream cheese

125g caster sugar

2 tbsp cornflour

3 large eggs

Grated zest of 1 small orange

300g blueberries

~~~~~~~~~~~

Preheat oven to 280°C / 160° fan / gas mk 4.  Grease a 24cm, deep springform tin.

Mix the biscuit crumbs with the melted butter and spoon into the tin. Pat down evenly and firmly and chill for 10 mins or while you prepare the filling.

Put the vanilla seeds (or vanilla bean paste) into a large bowl with the mascarpone, cream cheese, sugar, cornflour, eggs and orange zest. Beat with an electric whisk until well blended.

Put a handful of blueberries aside and stir the rest into the mixture. Pour into the tin. Place the tin on a baking sheet then scatter the remaining berries on top of the mixture, pushing them in slightly.

Bake for 45-60 mins until golden brown and almost set. (Mine was done after 45.)  Open the oven door and leave the cheesecake inside to cool.

Chill in the fridge for several hours or overnight, run a knife around the tin to release and dust with icing sugar before serving.

For the blueberry compote  (optional)

Put 250g blueberries into a pan with 100g caster sugar and cook until thickened.  Serve cool, spooned over each slice of cake.

Cuts into at least 12 servings.

SOLACE IN BAKING. BANANA AND COCONUT CAKE.

This year seems to be turning into our own personal “annus horribilis”.  Life is full of ups and  downs but the downs seem to be winning so far.  I won’t bore you with the list but the latest tragedy to befall us is the loss of our dog Lulu.

She has featured occasionally in this blog, ever present in the kitchen to see what titbits might come her way and even had her own biscuits in a post.  She was our “best girl”, a beautiful, well behaved and delightful dog who deserved to live longer than barely eight years.  It would have been her birthday in the middle of this month.

Getting used to life without Lulu will take some doing and with her passing being so recent, we are all at sixes and sevens.  All the dog lovers out there will know what I mean and how we feel.  Nick has been out riding his bicycle and shoveling mountains of gravel as a distraction.  I have been doing housework, in a chaotic and disorganised fashion, with a constant feeling that I have forgotten to do something.

Baking is as good a distraction as any, very therapeutic, and I could resist the urge no longer this afternoon.  I wasn’t up to tackling a challenging recipe but looking at two bananas way past their best, chose a very simple, chuck it all in the food processor recipe on the Good Food website, simply called “Banana Cake”.  You can see it here.

I added some desiccated coconut and a handful of halved strawberries and it was remarkably good.  Not fantastic and not as good as other banana cakes, but very good for such a quick and simple recipe.

It was nice and moist, had that slightly boingy texture that banana cakes often have, you could taste the coconut but it could have done with more strawberries to taste those properly.  I shall add it to my repertoire of very quick and easy cakes, handy for when getting a home made cake on the table fast is more important than how memorable it is.

The baking helped.  Words cannot describe how much we miss our best girl and time will heal, I know.  For the moment it hurts.

Banana and Coconut Cake

2 overripe smallish bananas

170g golden caster sugar

170g self raising flour

170g Flora Buttery

3 eggs

a few drops vanilla extract

50g desiccated coconut

a handful of small strawberries, halved

Method

Preheat the oven to 160° C / 140° fan / gas mk 3.  Put a paper liner into a 2lb loaf tin, or grease well.

Put all the ingredients except the coconut and strawberries into a food process and blend until well combined.  Add the coconut and strawberries and blend briefly to mix in.

Pour the mixture into the prepared tin.  Bake for 1 hour or until done. 

Cool in the tin for 10 minutes then turn out onto a wire rack to finish cooling.

Cuts into 10-12 thick slices.