Hello Edmond’s it’s been a while

Last Wednesday morning I made a supreme effort and got up at 6am to commence the baking. A friend was leaving work and these days any event is an excuse for baking. The two decomposing bananas on the bench turned my mind towards banana cake.

I’m not a big banana cake fan, although I have friends who go crazy for it. I’m much more of a carrot cake person, and much much more a cream cheese icing person but then who isn’t? So the banana cake was pretty straight forward apart from the fact that it said to cook in two sandwich tins – size unspecified.

Now I do have two sandwich tins but they are either 8 or 9” and had I cooked my banana cake in these I can guarantee that I would have had had two banana pancakes. So I did what any self respecting person would do at 6.15am - I stuck the whole lot in an 8” spring form tin, lowered the temperature a little and hoped for the best.

And it turned out really well! It’s now my new gold standard banana cake recipe! Here I was thinking I was courting disaster – turned out I was, just not with the banana cake. Seeing I had stuffed all the cake batter into one tin it took twice as long to cook as expected. This wouldn’t have been a problem if I hadn’t got cocky and decided to do some extra baking.

I thought I could just whip up some Anzac biscuits while I was waiting for the banana cake.I love that I am not the kind of person who decides to whip something up. I also love Anzac biscuits. Mmmmmmmm. I think there may have been a slight hitch in the recipe though as the mixture was really dry. Dry as in I had to press it into balls. This may not have been an issue but because the cake took so much longer I ended up having to put the trays of rolled up biscuits into the fridge where they dried up even further. By the time I cooked them that evening they where like little spherical chunks of chipboard.

A banana cake needs chocolate icing. Unfortunately I had already made the chocolate icing recipe so the closest thing was chocolate filling. This almost challenged the carrots in jelly recipe for the “what were you people thinking” award.

Imagine – if you will – an airy combination of gelatine, cocoa, sugar and egg white. It was quite liquid when I left home so I thought if I put it in the fridge at work to firm up I would be able to fill the cake with it later. The problem was that due to the gelatine it set completely so that when I tried to spoon it out it went sort of chopped and curdled looking. I did use it to fill the cake but the top layer was balancing and wobbling on top of this layer of brown chunky ooze. If anyone has ever seen those kids programs where they “gunge” people – it looked suspiciously like gunge. All this would have been forgivable if it had tasted any good, naturally it didn’t. And I didn't get a photo - a prime opportunity missed.

I’ve also got a pumpkin pie, ginger pudding and vanilla sauce to write up but I am afraid that will have to wait. This weekend is going to involve the cooking of a simnel cake – unexplored territory for monetary gain.