I made this cake after spotting a recipe on the Delicious Magazine website which you can see here. In the original recipe it's a loaf cake with extra maple syrup drizzled over it. As you can see, I made mine in one of my favourite "round" tins (a purchase from Ikea a few years ago).
It was one of those recipes that I felt compelled to make instantly! With the right number of bananas going brown in the fruit bowl and some pears that would soon be past their best, I found that for once I had all the right ingredients in the house. Well almost.
We are gradually working our way through a large box of windfall walnuts that we brought to the UK from France last October. The recipe calls for pecans but with all those walnuts in stock there was no way I was going to go out purposely to buy some. I do realise, of course, that pecans taste different from walnuts but - waste not, want not. And I am a fan of walnuts, especially when they're fresh and sweet like the ones we have.
The other change I made is in giving my cake a very light dusting of icing sugar before serving, rather than drizzle more maple syrup over it. As it turned out it was quite sweet enough and I think the extra maple syrup might have made it too sweet and possibly a bit sickly. I will have to make it again and add the maple drizzle just to check!
As it was it had a lovely texture, a nice crunch from the walnuts which I had deliberately not chopped too small - and it didn't last long. I'd like to be able to say that it kept well but it was gone in a couple of days!
Ingredients
100g unsalted
butter, melted
3 (about 250g)
really ripe bananas
100g golden caster
sugar
2 ripe but still
firm pears, cored, chopped and dusted in a little flour
1 tblsp maple
syrup
1 tsp vanilla
extract
1 large egg
150g plain flour
½ tsp bicarb
50g walnuts (or pecans),
roughly chopped
Method
Preheat the oven
to 180C / 160 fan / gas mk 4. Grease and line the base of a 20cm round tin, or a 900g loaf tin, base lined with baking paper or a paper
liner.
Mash the bananas
in a large bowl, stir in the melted butter and sugar until well combined. Stir through the pears, maple syrup and
vanilla then beat in the egg.
Sift in the flour
and bicarb and fold in with the nuts.
Transfer to the prepared tin and bake for 45 minutes until done.
Leave in the tin
for 10 minutes then lift out onto a wire rack to cool.
Drizzle some extra
maple syrup over before serving if you like.
Cuts into 8-10 slices.
I'm a fan of walnuts too (and pears come to that) and so this would suit me very, very well indeed. When I was a little thing the walnuts always seemed to be dry and bitter probably because they were stored badly and for far too long. Thankfully I was eventually persuaded that they didn't have to be that way.
ReplyDeletePhil, we first had fresh walnuts when we arrived home from a day out and found a little basket of them on the doorstep of our little house in France. They had been left there by our neighbour and the taste was totally divine.
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