Going bananas!

Fruit based cakes are fun to do. They are quick and easy and they give you a lot of scope to experiment with.

Ingredients:

• 3 ripe bananas (roughly mashed)
• 2 eggs
• 2C Maida
• 1 ½ C powdered sugar
• ½ C butter (softened but not totally melted)
• 1 tsp baking powder
• ½ tsp bicarbonate of soda
• ¼ t salt
• 1 tsp cinnamon powder or cardamom powder
• ¼ C of dry fruits/nuts of your choice
• 1 tsp vanilla essence
• a few tablespoons of milk(optional)

Method:

• Sift the maida, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda, salt and cinnamon/elaichi powder thrice and keep aside.
• Beat the eggs till light and fluffy. Add the powdered sugar and beat for 3-4 minutes more. Then add the butter and beat the mixture some more.
• Add the mashed bananas and vanilla essence and beat for a minute or two to ensure even mixing.
• Cut and fold the maida mixture(prepared in point 1) along with the dry fruits/nuts.
• Bake at 180-190 Deg. C for 35-40 minutes( or till a toothpick comes out clean.)

Source: The basic recipe was found at Shyamala’s food blog. We made a few minor modifications.Please note Shayamala used a different order of mixing ingredients.She creams the butter and sugar first and then adds the eggs etc. You can use our method or her’s-both should work.

Lakshmi’s notes: I substituted half the maida with ground almonds. I substituted the butter with fresh cream. I added an additional banana + 6tbsp of milk intead of the two eggs the recipe requires. I cut the sugar by 1/2 of a cup since I was using really ripe and sweet bananas.  Instead of roughly mashing the bananas, I pulsed all of them in a blender with milk.

This is most definitely a cake rather than a bread. Its really rich and moist.  

Mandira’s notes: This is my first even banana cake(or bread). I totally skipped the dry fruits/nuts and instead of the cardamom powder mentioned in the original recipe used cinnamon powder. I also added a tsp of vanilla which wasn’t mentioned in the original recipe.( I got this idea from another blog but I had read so many banana cake recipes before I baked mine, that now I cant remember which one mentioned this!!). I dint have bicarbonate of soda at home, so I increased the quantity of baking soda by ½ a teaspoon. After cutting and folding, I felt the batter had become a little thick so I added 2 tbsp of milk. I made half the quantity of the original recipe.

Please make sure that the butter is really soft before you add it to the batter else it wont blend it well with the rest of the batter and that will make your cake a little dry in some portions. I made this mistake and though the error dint kill the cake, I could have got better results had I followed instructions properly! if the sugar isn’t finely powdered, you may get granules of sugar when you bite into your cake. My sugar wasn’t as fine as it should have been but I kinda liked the texture the granules of sugar lent to the cake- especially in the crust!