Butterscotch Banana Bread-Cake
(Arik loves these so much, if I don’t watch it, he’ll eat a whole one.)
The more cake-like banana breads are always too rich and too cloyingly sweet for my taste, especially when you want a nice, satisfying slice with a morning of late afternoon cup of tea. This one I’ve tinkered with till the texture is just somewhere between cake & bread, made hearty and earthy with the addition of wholewheat and pecans, and that added nutty sweetness of caramelizing the bananas gives a much more rounded sweetness to the bread.
Despite the extra step of making the banana butterscotch, the whole thing comes together so very fast, so lets go on with it shall we? If only to make sure you have something to sink into for your 4 o’clock cuppa.
Ingredients:
3 large ripe bananas
150g butter
1tbsp apple cider vinegar
1tbsp rum
200g All Purpouse flour
80g Whole wheat flour
75g soft brown sugar
25g caster sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
100g raisins
100g pecans/walnuts
2 large eggs
100ml milk
Start by placing the ripe bananas, butter & 25 of caster sugar into a pan, and caramalise the bananas on a medium heat, until all the bananas are turned to mush, the butter is liquid and bubbly and the sugar is caramel.
Take it off the heat, add the apple cider vinegar & rum. Leave to cool. preheat oven to 180c/350f
In a large bowl, mix all the dry ingredients together until well combined. Then beat the eggs & milk together in another bowl, add the cooled banana mixture to the egg mix, beat together, and add all the liquids into the dry ingredients. Fold together with a spatula until its just combined & there’s no more dry flour bits remaining, but do not over-mix.
Pour the batter into a well greased loaf tin. I used a large bundt tin, but if you’re using a regular loaf you will need a good farmhouse size tin because this is a large cake.
In my bundt tin the cake took 40 mins to bake through, testing at 30mins. Test with a skewer to see if the middle is done, especially if you’re using a loaf pan where the middle will take longer to cook.
Leave in the pan to cool, then turn out. I decorated mine with a simple drizzle of icing sugar mixed with lemon juice to a pourable consistency.
