Guest Post: Spiced Banana Cake

Today marks the introduction of a new feature on Princess Cupcake, guest bloggers. This is the first of several posts written by my best friend Inthannon. Enjoy! All photographs are owned by Inthannon, so please do not use them without her or my permission.

Last week my friend Princess Cupcake asked me to do a couple of guest posts for her since I’m almost as much of a baking enthusiast as she is. This is the first and later on I will bring to the table my Finnish recipes for couple of Christmas goodies.

This first one however, is something I made last night because my fiancée’s sweet tooth was aching. ;) Since I know Cupcake doesn’t care for bananas and I really like banana cake and think it’s a brilliant way to use up over ripe bananas (if you have them in the house), here’s my favourite one with a Christmassy twist.

First thing about banana cake is that the riper the banana the better the cake. The best bananas for this kind of thing are the ones that you look at and think “That’s too dark and gooey to eat” (Obviously if the banana looks like it’s growing unspeakable things or about to walk out of the fruit basket, don’t bake it, bin it). One thing you’ll notice between the cake you’ll make and my pictures is that yours will be darker. This will be because you’ve done what I said and not what I’ve done and used properly ripe bananas... Hello from Miss Hypocrite ;)

Note on measurements: Since I’m weird and foreign, most of my recipes have these strange measurements of dl. This stands for decilitre, which is 100 millilitres. So if the recipe says 2dl of sugar, take a standard measuring jug that has millilitres on it and using the millilitre scale measure out 200ml of sugar. Or go to uncle google and search for a way to convert sugar volume to weight. Or a volume of your choosing.

Spiced Banana Cake (or about 24 cupcakes)

150g butter

2.5 dl sugar

2 eggs

4-5 dl flour (depending on how moist you want your cake, also depends on size of eggs)

2 tsp baking powder

1 tsp bicarbonate of soda

1 tsp salt

1 tsp ginger

1 tsp cloves

2 tsp cinnamon

3 crushed bananas

For a standard cake, heat the oven to 170C or Gas Mark 3-4. For cupcakes (unless using a cupcake maker) 180 C/Gas Mark 4. Cream together the butter and the sugar, then beat in the eggs one at a time. Mix together all the dry ingredients and then slowly add into the mix in turns with the crushed bananas. Mix until even. Pour into a buttered/floured cake tin (deep, 9”/23cm diameter) and bake for 50-60 minutes, or until cooked through. Cupcakes should only take 8-12 minutes in a machine or about 15 minutes in the oven. I used my cupcake maker for these mainly because I’ve only used it twice.

Figure 1 This is pretty much the ideal amount of mix for my cupcake maker.

Note: I tend to almost double the amount of spices since I enjoy spicy things, but there is no real need to do this (unless you’re like me). Also non-stick palette knife is the BEST at getting cupcakes out of the maker. Just slide it between the cake and the maker, apply a little leverage and hey presto, one free cake!

I decided against icing these, just because I find they are nice on their own (and I ran out of day) but I think a cinnamon buttercream might be really yummy with these. Or maybe something with ginger. This is the beauty of baking, we can all make changes to the recipe if we don’t like something in it.

Until next time,

Inthannon