I hadn’t meant to create an entirely different cake when I decided to bake the chocolate, whiskey, currant banana cake (or Dumb Rum Banana Cake, as it’s known in Emma’s house) as my hello gift to Liberty Family Church. The cake just morphed into something different as Becci and I trawled along the aisles in Lucky Supermarket, looking for ingredients, on my first Saturday in Cambodia.
- Firstly, I discovered that butter is expensive. The cheapest block of 227g of butter was $3.50
- Chocolate is expensive as I expected. There isn’t a tesco value or sainsbury basic equivalent block of dark chocolate that I can use either. Hmm…
- Sultanas and currants are ridiculously expensive. The 180g of sultanas was going to cost me $1.90.
- I couldn’t see a bag of walnuts or pecans that I can use in baking.
- Rum or whiskey – well, alcohol is pretty cheap in Cambodia. I wasn’t sure whether Cambodians would like the flavour of either one of them in a cake.
I’m standing looking at the dried food shelves and wondering if there’s any cheap dried fruit in Cambodia. I’m scratching my head, ‘what am I going to do about flavour and texture?’ All my normal options were out and obviously I needed to economise on some ingredients. And thus the cake transforms from a chocolate, nutty, whiskey, currant, banana cake into a spiced, banana cake with chocolate chunks. ‘Out with the dried fruit and nuts’, I decide. ‘I’m going to add flavour with a mix of spices and create texture by adding a greater quantity of chocolate chunks to it.’
Plenty of chocolate surely covers over a multitude of improvisations.
There was never a moment of questioning whether I should bother baking. Needs must and all that – I wanted to give a hello present to the church and I needed to do some baking.
Ingredients for the Spiced Banana and Dark Chocolate Chunk Cake
- 175g plain flour
- 2 tsps of mixed spice or 1 tsp of cinnamon powder, 1/2 tsp of ground ginger, 1/4 tsp of ground nutmeg, 1/4 tsp of ground cloves
- 2 tsp baking powder
- ½ tsp bicarbonate of soda
- ½ tsp salt
- 125g unsalted butter, melted
- 90-100g soft brown sugar
- 2 large eggs
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 3 large or 4 small very ripe bananas, mashed (about 300g in weight with the skins off)
- 200g dark chocolate, roughly chopped
Method
1. Preheat the oven to 170°C/325°F/gas mark 3 and line (preferably) springform cake tin, anywhere between 23-25cm. I only had a 25cm round cake tin at hand. It was the first time I’d used it and it worked beautifully for sharing with so many people.
2. Measure out the plain flour, spices, bicarbonate of soda, baking powder, salt and give them all a good mix with a metal or wooden spoon. This means that you don’t get any lumps of salt or bicarbonate of soda in the eventual cake.
3. Melt the butter either in a pan or in zap it in the microwave in a pyrex bowl. Now add the sugar to the butter and stir well until the sugar is well blended into the butter. It should look almost toffee-like in colour because of the brown sugar. Follow with the eggs. Beat them in, one at a time, to the sugary buttery mixture.
Top tip: Emma shared a really good tip with me, if you are going to melt the butter in the microwave. Use a pyrex bowl, add the butter and COVER IT WITH KITCHEN PAPER. It means that if the butter happens to explode in the microwave, because you zap the butter for a bit too long, it won’t go all over the inside of your microwave.
4. Now add the mashed bananas,vanilla extract and the chopped chocolate to the mixture and mix them in well.
5. Add in the flour mix (from step 2) but add a third of it at a time, stirring well after each addition. Once all of the dry mixture is mixed in, add the cake mixture into the cake tin and bake in the middle of the oven for 50-60 minutes. I check after 40 minutes and if the cake looks like it is browning at the top too quickly, then I cover it with some baking paper to protect the cake from burning. The time needed for the cake to bake will vary depending on the size of the cake tin that you use, so don’t worry if the cake needs an extra 15-20 minutes in the oven. You’ll know when the cake is done when you insert a cake tester, or I use a sharp knife, into the cake and the tester comes out clean.
6. Let the cake cool completely. Then cut it up into as many pieces as you like and share it around.
Of course, you could serve it whilst it’s still warm with cream or icecream. I just find that the cake is easier to cut when it is cold and you don’t get so much chocolate goo all over the knife as you are cutting it. The cake stores well in an airtight container – not that this one had a chance. It was all gobbled up in under 10 minutes.
The verdict? The cake is really tasty. The chocolate chunks give it texture and bite that would be missing if you omitted them. The spices worked really well in transforming the flavour of this cake and it went down really well with the Cambodian palette too. I still prefer the chocolatey, whiskey and currant version of the cake (who would blame me) but while I’m here, I will quite happily bake this new banana and chocolate cake.
