Banana Ginger Cake

I love a good cookbook, pretty glossy ones with lots of mouth-watering photos to match the recipes. And ones with recipes that are a little bit different or unusual but that ultimately always work, recipes that have been developed with love and thoroughly tested to avoid kitchen disappointments occurring for us at home. One of the best baking book purchases I have made in the last couple of years has to Dan Lepard’s Short and Sweet which is a beautiful book full of delectably delicious recipes for breads, cakes and pies. And so far everything I have made from the book has turned out perfectly, which is a bit of a miracle as since moving into a house with a Rayburn I do still at times struggle to get the perfectly risen cake or not overly crusty loaf of bread.

Dan Lepard also used to write for the Guardian and when on a recent trawl of the internet for recipes to use up some browning bananas I came across this dark banana ginger cake recipe. And so it was a complete no brainer to get stuck into this recipe rather than continuing my recipe search. Due to not having all of the appropriate ingredients in the original recipe I did make a few little adjustments, as well as adding a lemon syrup to the cake after baking to make it a little more moist but I would probably recommend going to try Dan’s original recipe first as in my opinion he is a true baking king!!

Oh and this recipe uses vegetable oil rather than butter so is dairy free, making it a great blog addition.

INGREDIENTS

200g banana

200g soft dark brown sugar

3 extra-large eggs (one of mine was a double yolker so not sure if that counts as 4)

125ml vegetable oil

50g glace ginger

½ teaspoon ground ginger

150g plain flour

50g rye flour

3 teaspoons baking powder

Juice of 1 lemon

2 tablespoons  of caster sugar

Pre-heat the oven to 170°C / 335°F and line a 24 x 18 cm baking tin with non-stick baking parchment.

Mash the sugar and bananas together in a large bowl before mixing in the oil, eggs and glace ginger. Finally fold in the ground ginger, baking powder and flours, stirring until fully combined.

Transfer the mixture into the prepared tin and bake in the oven for 50-60 minutes until golden in colour and springy to the touch.

Whilst the cake is in the oven put the lemon juice and caster sugar in a small pan and place over a low heat until the sugar has fully dissolved. When the cake is removed from the oven and whilst still in the tin use a skewer or sharp knife to make lots incisions in the cake. Drizzle the lemon syrup over the cake allowing it to seep into the holes made by the knife/skewer. Then once cooled transfer out of the tin and the cake is now ready to enjoy.