No 21 - Enormous Banana Chocolate Chip Cake

Banana Cake

At the time I started university in 1987, I had a late-Victorian ‘semi’ divided into 2 flats.  I lived downstairs and my tenant upstairs covered my mortgage.  At one change of tenancy a woman turned up to view who seemed altogether too well dressed to want my scruffy flat in our tired part of town.  She was a manager at the city’s only professional, live, theatre company.  Imagine my surprise when later that year Lyndsey turned up in my law class.  She was studying and holding down a job (like me) and had resolved her housing situation by buying an equally aged and equally impractical home – equally in need of some TLC in a nearby suburb.  We became firm friends, sharing interests in growing food, cooking, and studying law; and she educated me in theatre and travel. 

It is one of my great regrets that I lost contact with Lyndsey when she married and moved to South Australia, and shortly after that I moved to England.  I still have her banana cake recipe, and think of her often.  I know she had two sons but they will be young men by now. 

Like her this recipe has travelled too.  For many years after arriving here I lived in a yacht.  Our boat had no oven and I became adept at improvisation (in true theatrical style): producing all cooked food on 2 Diesel-cooker hot spots with 2 pots, 1 frying pan and a 10 litre pressure cooker.

Working on the principle that steamed pudding can be achieved in the pressure cooker, I decided to experiment with it producing bread and cakes.  Steamed bread is OK but  lacks crust.  We preferred the frying pan bread.  However Lyndsey’s banana cake was a great success by this means and was for years virtually the only cake produced in out ‘mobile’ home.  (I say virtually , corn bread eaten with jam was later discovered and deemed acceptable as cake but had to be eaten really fresh.)

I have adapted it a bit to make this big (birthday) cake, adding pineapple to ensure the large cake stays moist with all the extra baking time needed.

Enormous Banana Chocolate Chip Cake

16 oz oil (weighed)
1 cup brown sugar
4 eggs
12 bananas, mashed with 2/3 cup golden syrup
large tin of pineapple, drained and chopped
6 cups flour
4 tsp baking powder
4 tsp baking soda dissolved in 1/4 cup of milk
2 packets of dark chocolate nibs.

Grease and line a roasting tin about 12" x 16" and at least 4" deep.

Beat oil and sugar together.
Add eggs one at a time and beat well.
Add the mashed banana, the pineapple, and choc chips.
Sift in the dry ingredients.
Add the soda and milk.

Bake at 160-170 C, for 1-1.5 hours.  Test with a skewer - it should come out clean.

Cool in the tin.  Turn out onto a large tray and ice with lemon/cream cheese icing (see the carrot cake icing recipe at No 12.)

 

No 16 - Sticky Lemon Cake

This recipe first saw the light in my kitchen for my partner’s 50^th birthday.  There was a huge party, 2 roast shoulders of pork, 2 shoulders of mutton in a Moroccan stew, gallons of chilli beans, and a table groaning under salads and bread, fruit, cheese and a roasting dish sized banana cake.  (I’ll get onto banana cake eventually.)  I wanted something  that was sharp and flavoursome in small servings and settled for this cake.

I love cakes with ground almonds.  I love cakes with yoghurt, and I love lemon sweets (Lemon ice-cream, lemon baked cheesecake) so this ‘ticked all the boxes’.

Sticky Lemon Cake

175 g (6oz) unsalted butter
250 g (9 oz) castor sugar
2 lemons
3 eggs
75 g (2.5 oz) plain flour
2 tsp baking powder
150 g (5.5 oz) ground almonds
150 g (5.5 oz) natural yoghurt

Preheat the overn to 170 C.  Grease and line an 8" deep spring form tin
Cream the butter and 150g (5.5 oz) sugar.  Add grated zest of both lemons.
Gradually beat in the eggs one at a time.
Mix the dry ingredients, then fold in the creamed mix.  Stir in the juiceof one lemon and the yoghurt.
Bake for 40 minutes (till the cake is firm to touch).  Do not open the oven for the first 20 minutes.
Leave the cake to cool.
Heat the remaining sugar and lemon juice, skewer the cake a few times and pour the syrup over the cake.
Leave it to cool completely before removing it from the tin.

No 15 - Chocolate Beetroot Brownie

Chocolate Beetroot Brownie

Now this is a brownie worthy of the name.  I love beetroot; it’s one of my favourite vegetables.  It makes great  soup (and not just borscht – perhaps when I’ve finished this baking challenge I’ll just put some of my favourite recipes on here, like beetroot and coconut soup).  I preserve it sliced in a vinegar brine and eat loads in cheese sandwiches (my favourite). And it’s easy to grow if your garden has clay soil.

I spent a year in Denmark a few years ago working in a restaurant kitchen.  Beetroot (rødbeder) is a staple in their food world and I learned preparations and uses for beetroot I never imagined before.

Unfortunately for beetroot, there is nothing subtle or secretive about it; cook it and bright pink splotches appear in every part of the kitchen.  Nothing provides so much evidence of what you’ve splashed and what you have touched as beetroot does.  (Mind you I don’t mind getting my hands in it to skin the cooked beetroot so I might be a bit messier than the averagely stain conscious person).

Before this weeks baking, some beetroot had been languishing in my fridge for a few weeks while I psyched myself up to this recipe.  It turned out to be superbly easy.  I didn’t use the food processor – I flung the cooked skinned beetroot in a blender with all the eggs together and whipped up a delightful pink egg nog.

The rest went by the recipe except that I used plain white flour instead of rice flout (of which I had none).

http://www.riverford.co.uk/feed/in:recipes/chocolate-beetroot-brownies/

This website is so good I have put a link to it in the ‘Try this….’ box of links over there on the right…->

No one spotted the beetroot without being told.  It’s a beautifully moist, smooth brownie.  There’s a hint of beetroot taste to those in the know (well to me anyway), but I had to tell.  Well you know what beetroot does it you eat it.  Even cooked in a cake the pink dye passes  through your kidneys.  So Louise and I figured that knowing they’d consumed beetroot might provide the answer to a puzzle for the cake-testers at work.

No 19 - Squidgy Lemon and Ginger Cake

Squidgy Lemon and Ginger Cake

Another cake I first enjoyed after a session of yacht racing – thanks again to Sarah G.

The recipe is on the internet at http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/1711/squidgy-lemonginger-cake and it has everything going for it:

1 – it’s a fabulous tasting cake

2 – it’s moist and keeps well

3 – it’s easy (no ‘cream the butter and sugar’ stuff)

Years ago I spent a summer sailing in the Baltic.  In a Polish port I meta very interesting Finn who’d been sailing to Polish ports for decades; since well before the end of the Communist era there.  This gentleman worked for a famous Finnish telephone manufacturer and entertained us for hours with takes of his travels about the world marketing their technology. 

At some stage the conversation came around, as it often does amongst long-distance sailors, to electronic equipment on board.  The environment, as salt laden as it is, is not conducive to the endless reliable operation of things we have come to rely on. I will never forget our hosts expression for giving up on something that has broken down one time too many: “paint it green and throw it overboard”.

My family’s response to ‘failed’ cakes might be similarly characterised as “cover it in custard and call it pudding”. 

Such was the fate of this fabulous cake the first time I made it for them.  I had probably greased the tin with oil with the result that at least 1/3 of the cake remained firmly attached when I tried to turn it out.  (In my experience nothing greases a cake tin like butter, but then I am Kiwi and we are famous for our association with the stuff.)  Anyway the texture of the cake meant it would rather let go of itself than the walls of the tin.

It got covered in custard and called pudding; so successfully in fact that my family now regard this only as a pudding.

So the lessons are: 1. Grease the tin with butter, 2. Use a spring-form tin, and 3. If all else fails cover it in custard and call it pudding.

No 18 - Sydney Special

Sydney Special

Another recipe that came I believe from one of those 1960’s community cookbooks.  It was a good one for kids to start their baking experience with.  You don’t have to strain an arm beating sugar and butter to a fine creamy paste.  As a kid my heart always dropped when the recipe opened with: “Cream the butter and sugar….”  That muscle in my upper arm, just below my shoulder, could begin to ache just contemplating that instruction.

Sydney Special

1 cup flour
1 cup coconut
1 cup cornflakes
1/2 cup sugar
1 tsp baking powder
2 tsp cocoa
5 oz melted butter

Mix, press into a sponge roll tin and bake at 180 C for 15-20 minutes.  Finish with chocolate icing and a sprinkle of desiccated coconut.  Cut into squares (about 24).

No 23 - Peanut Biscuits

OK - I did a bit of a clean out in the recipe book.  This is something that I have meant to try out for a while.  It came out of a 1994 Australian Woman's Weekly pullout that my Mum had in her stash.  There was a bit of a clear out when I was home last year and I rescued this to try some of the interesting looking Sweet Things.

Peanut Biscuits


125 g butter
1/4 cup (60ml) crunchy peanut butter
1/2 up (110 g) caster sugar
3/4 (150g) firmly packed brown sugar
1 egg
1.5 cups (225g) plain flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
3/4 tsp baking soda
3 x 40g scorched peanut bars finely chopped


Cream the butter, sugar and peanut butter.
Beat in the egg.
Add the chopped peanut bars and sift in the dry ingredients.


Shape the dough into a log about 5cm across, roll it in foil and chill it for an hour or until firm.
Cut into 1cm thick slices and bake about 12 minutes at 170-180C.  Makes about 30.

I don't know exactly what scorched peanut bars are - I used small Snickers Bars. 

These are wow.  I might even try for a photo.  Watch this space.....

World Superbikes / Langstone Wadeway

We're going to the bike racing at Assen in a couple of weeks.  The week following that I have a salvage course in Rotterdam (for work).  I'm looking forward to something other than commuting on the bike - a change of scenery.  Overnight ferry from Harwich will make a change from the usual dash for a channel port on the South Coast.  It will mean a break in the baking though for a couple of weeks.

Haven't done much for Easter, but managed to get a lot of seeds in the garden at last, painted up a garden storage box before it started raining, and finally fulfilled a minor ambition to walk across the Langstone Causeway. 

The causeway is reputedly very ancient, and still in good shape for 3/4 of the distance; firm and gravelled.  However a canal company dredged  a channel through it in 1824, a channel which is only really fordable on foot at lowest tides.  The causeway on the island side of that channel is buried in about 30cm of very sticky mud. 

Lowest Spring Tide was about 0700 this morning.  It started raining at 0645!  I didn't take a camera, so only the line of footprints through the mud evidence that I was ever there at all.  (I had to do the last bit through the mud in bare feet!)

As the rain has continued I am sorting out the recipe folder.  I'll find something novel to test and share it with you later.

A snap from last summer's garden

No 22 - FTC Square

 FTC Square (uncooked)

In 1979 when I left home to joint he NZ Forest Service, vast tracts of man-made pine forest marching across the NZ landscape were still owned by the State.  I started work for the government.  Our training was carried out in Rotorua where resided the main research and educational facility for production forestry in NZ.  The Forest Training Centre had one of those (even then) old-fashioned institutions – the tea lady.  The tea-lady is an endangered species.  Ours was delightful.  She served tea from an enormous enamel pot propelled from room to room on a trolley; and she supplemented her wage by baking and selling alongside the tea a few biscuits or squares.  There was one variety each day.  She came from the Keep it Simple School of Catering  - you either bought it or you didn’t.  Mind you, she knew what would sell, and most remarkably, gave me some of her reipes.  So I’ll share this one with you.

Note: In New Zealand we have a malted wheat flake ‘biscuit’ which we eat as a breakfast cereal that goes under the brand name ‘Weetbix’.  In some other parts of the world these things exist with spelling variations, but a recognizably similar name.

FTC Square

9 crushed Weetbix

1 cup desiccated coconut

4 oz  melted butter

½ tin of sweetened condensed milk (called Highlander in NZ, Carnation in UK)

1 cup of mixed fruit (fruit cake mix)

¾ TB cocoa

Mix all that up and press it into a lined sponge roll tin (about 8” x 12”).  Ice with lemon or orange icing. 

It improves with being stored for 2-3 days.

No 20 - Sultana Cake

Sultana Cake

Mum was of the school of housekeeping which believed you should always have a selection of baked items in tins available to accompany morning and afternoon teas, whether for guests or for the menfolk working on the farm.

These days I cannot imagine anyone spending one day a week baking (at home) just to fill cake tins; not least because we are all encouraged to eat less sugar and butter and super-refined flour; and not to snack (or at least not snack on cake) between meals.

This sultana cake was one of Mum’s specialties; a slightly old-fashioned cake even then and somehow very ‘English’.  It suggested to me recipes from an age of employed cooks in country house kitchens with a very basic range of plentiful local ingredients, enhanced by carefully meted out stores of the exotic or hard to obtain; for us this was the sultanas.

I have no idea of the actual origin of the recipe, it probably came from Mum’s mother, and it was regarded as a luxury in our household; second only to Christmas cake.  It was treated as being expensive and we would get a severe telling off if, having come home from school to find no one indoors, we raided the cake tins and ate any sultana cake.  We weren’t encouraged to raid the cake tins – full stop – but sneaking bits of sultana cake was tantamount to a hanging offence.  It was probably the quantity of sultanas that go into it that stretched my mother’s delicately balanced household budget and made it the object of special status for us kids.  Sultanas were ‘off-limits’, kept on a top shelf, and only for use in special baked items and puddings.

Sultana Cake

½ lb butter

½ lb sugar

3 eggs

¾ lb flour

1 tsp baking powder

1 lb sultanas

Lemon essence (optional)

a sauce made of 1 heaped dsp of cornflour in a small cup of water – & cooled

Cream butter and sugar, beat in eggs one at a time, add sultanas and sift in flour and BP.  Finally add the gloop made of cooked cornflour and water.

Bake in a lined, greased 8” round tin, 170 C for 1¼ to 1½ hours.