Banana Meets Caramel

I like using overripe bananas as an excuse to bake, and on this occasion I realised I'd never actually posted the banana cake recipe I use (though I've mentioned it before, and its source - my friend Jenn).

I'll post it now, as much for my own convenience the next time I want to use it as anything else. (Locating my recipes became somewhat trickier when we moved to Japan, leaving most of my hard copies behind in a giant glorious box of baking books and folders >_<.)

Amazing Banana Cake

• 125g butter (softened)
• 1.5 cup caster sugar
• 2 mashed bananas (the riper the better, seriously!)
• 2 eggs
• dash vanilla extract
• 100mL milk
• 1.5 cup SR flour
• half tsp bicarb soda

1. Preheat oven to 180 degrees Celsius
2. Grease/line a 20cm cake tin or 12 muffin tray
3. Food process all wet ingredients (butter, sugar, bananas, eggs, vanilla, milk)
4. Add flour, bicarb and process well
5. Pour into tin/tray
6. Bake 1 hour for cake or 25 mins for muffins

The catch is that I don't have a food processor. So I just mixed it all up as best I could by hand. And by, "as best I could," I actually mean I didn't incorporate the butter very well at all. I had this idea that maybe it would all just melt together nicely in the oven (and my arm was tired from mixing).

As it turns out, unincorporated butter does not just obediently mix itself into the cake once you put it in the oven. In fact, the butter bubbles to the top of the cake and drips all over the oven. I was worried that I had managed to fail with a never-fail recipe.

But in a happy turn of fate, the bubbling butter actually had a kind of caramelising effect on the top of the cake. And in a fortunate coincidence I had already prepared a caramel sauce (admittedly only after realising I didn't have enough cream on hand to make chocolate ganache).

I got the idea and recipe for caramel on banana from the always fantastic Donna Hay, on here recipe page, here. She's surely a genius. That said, fresh cream is quite expensive in Japan, so I reduced the quantities down to the following, which was a good amount to cover my cake.

Donna Hay's caramel sauce of deliciousness
(...possibly not its official name...)
- 1/2 cup brown sugar

- 165 mL cream

"While the cake is cooling, place the sugar and cream in a saucepan over medium heat and stir until the sugar is dissolved. Increase the heat and simmer rapidly for 8 minutes or until the sauce thickens. Allow to cool and spread over the cake."

I enjoy it immensely when my baking errors produce unexpectedly positive results.