New Year, New Cake!

Brazil & Banana Bread - Bake a cake on a cosy day inside...

Hello to all of my lovely blogging friends and Happy New Year - if it's not already too late to say that! The fresh start has given me a new vigour for getting my blog back up and running again after a little sabbatical - I have of course been baking in the last few months but the general busyness of life and Christmas has prevented me from actually writing about anything!

It's a cold and chilly day here in London, we've been waiting for the 'Beast from the East' to hit us all week long and finally it arrived today – yay! Alas, very rarely do we actually get a snow day in the capital so I of course spent the day in the office whilst everyone else in the UK was making snow dogs and putting their pictures of hot chocolate onto Facebook.

I found the recipe for ‘Brazil & Banana Bread’ in my monthly magazine subscription to Good Food Magazine, which I am fantastic at reading cover to cover, but terrible at actually getting around to making any of the recipes featured. I always seem to be making banana cake, purely for the fact that we always seem to have an abundance of left over bananas - despite being covered in them myself, I can’t bear eating a banana when they get all freckly and start turning brown, so if they don’t end up in a cake then they invariably end up in the bin. I absolutely love coconut together with banana so it didn't take much convincing to give this recipe a try. 

Snow was predicted for last weekend, and when it didn't actually put in an appearance I decided to cheer myself up and kid myself that it was actually an extension of the Christmas holidays; I put my reindeer slippers back on, turned on the TV to watch Babe (The Sheep Pig) and dusted my mixer off to do some baking. 

This cake was absolutely de-lish, probably one of the nicest variations of a banana bread that I’ve made – a squidgy, moist cake with a buttery and crunchy, crumble style topping. I added a handful of chocolate chips into my cake and whilst it didn’t spoil it, it didn’t need it either as it was plenty sweet enough already – I would definitely leave it out in future. I also made the mistake of adding ‘Angel Flake’ coconut rather than desiccated coconut – Angel Flake Coconut is from the US I think and is a lot sweeter and more moist than what we have on offer here in the UK. Because of this my cake took longer to cook and I think I should have probably left it in the oven a little longer as it was just a teeny bit too squidgy…but it was still a lovely bake to eat with a big cup of tea on a cold Saturday afternoon, like tomorrow will undoubtedly be! X

Ingredients: 

100ml Sunflower oil
140g Caster sugar
140g Plain Flour
140g Brazil nuts
50g Desiccated coconut
1 tbsp Butter
2 Large very ripe bananas - black skins are ideal
1 Large egg
5 tbsp Milk
1/2 tsp Baking Powder
1/4 tsp Cinnamon

Method:

- Heat oven to 180c/160c fan/Gas Mark 4.

- Grease a 900g loaf tin, then line the base and ends with a long strip of baking parchment.

- Stir together 2 tbsp each of the sugar, flour, nuts and coconut. Add the butter and rub together to sticky crumbs and put to one side.

- Mash the bananas well and then stir in the sunflower oil, egg and milk. In a separate large bowl, mix half of the remaining sugar, and the remaining flour, nuts and coconut, and then add the baking powder and cinnamon.

- Whisk the egg white to stiff peaks, add the final bit of sugar and whisk again until stiff and shiny. Add the banana mixture into the dry ingredients and then gently fold in the egg white mixture.

- Gently scrape the mix into the tin and scatter the crumble  over the top. Bake for approximately 40 minutes, or until a skewer comes out completely clean (not with some squidge like I did). If the cake starts to go too brown, cover with foil. Leave to cool completely in the tin before serving.