Charles Campion’s Banana Cake Recipe

This banana cake recipe is from Charles Campion’s Fifty Recipes To Stake Your Life On and makes a really, really gooey banana cake. Campion describes the recipe collection as “fifty, sure-fire, tried-and-tested recipes and fifty stories to go with them” and its a great starting point for those just getting into cooking and looking for a book that’s neither daunting or too immense to know where to start.

Fifty Recipes to Stake Your Life On by Charles Campion

I first made Campion’s banana cake several months ago and it’s so easy and tasty I now make it quite often. It also proved very popular when I took some in for a work cake bake sale (for charity) and I was ordered, in no uncertain terms, to ensure that I made some more for the subsequent sales over the next few weeks!

Best way to describe the texture is to compare it to a chocolate brownie, where there’s a layer at the very bottom that’s not quite cooked through, it’s still doughy and even more moist than the rest, which has cooked through to become proper cake.

If you want to avoid that, I guess you could leave it in the oven longer, but I love that aspect so I always do it exactly like that.

Banana Cake

Prep Time 5 minutes
Cook Time 1 hour
Total Time 1 hour 5 minutes

Ingredients

  • 175 g caster sugar
  • 225 g self-raising flour
  • 100 g unsalted butter
  • 45 ml milk
  • 2 large eggs
  • 3 medium bananas, as ripe as possible!
  • 2-3 drops vanilla essence

Recipe Notes

Note: Campion says, "because we are looking for a soggy end product, the old-faithful test of sticking in a skewer and withdrawing it clean is not appropriate. With practice you'll simply need to glance at it to tell. In the meantime, because of the style of cake we're trying to achieve, there's a wide margin of error to make things easier."

Note: I find the cake rises delightfully and the top turns a lovely rich chocolate brown (darker than golden brown) and usually splits open across the top.

Instructions

  • Preheat the oven to 185 degrees Centigrade.

  • Measure all the ingredients straight into your food processor and whizz into a smooth batter.

  • Butter a large loaf tin well, then throw in some flour, tap and turn the tin to coat the flour over all surfaces and then tap out any excess into the bin or sink.

  • Pour the batter into the tin.

  • Bake for an hour.

  • DONE!

 

The book is called Fifty Recipes To Stake Your Life On and is one of the few cookery books with no photographs in it that I rate highly.

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