A couple of birthdays last week gave me the excuse to bake some cakes, plus I had a dozen of Cathy's lovely chickens eggs to use. They made some fantastic pancakes on Shrove Tuesday from Jo Wheatley's 'A Passion for Baking' Book and this time I chose to make her Banana loaf for my friend Raph.
In the book recipe you use 100g demerara sugar and 150g soft light brown sugar. You are meant to top the cake batter with pecans and cinnamon before baking, but I chose to mix 100g of dark chocolate chips into the batter instead.
I used my trusty new Kenwood hand-mixer for all the whisking and mixing.
Rather than make one 2lb loaf, I decided to make 6 muffins and one 1lb loaf, so divided the mixture accordingly.
The muffins were baked in a static 170c oven for 30 minutes
and the 1lb loaf for 50 minutes.
They both worked out rather nicely I'm pleased to say! It was also my Mum's birthday over the weekend and two things she loves are dark chocolate and ginger. What better excuse then, to make a chocolate ginger cake. I found the recipe in the Green & Blacks Chocolate Recipes Book.
I can't link the recipe, but you can pretty much take any chocolate cake recipe and add 100g of chopped up stem ginger, plus add 3 tbls of the syrup to the batter.
I needed to slice the top off to make a more even surface for the icing.
The simple icing consisted of 100g of dark chocolate and 100g of finely chopped crystallised ginger.
The chocolate was melted in a glass bowl over a simmering pan of water and the ginger was stirred into it.
Slather all over the top of your cake and allow to cool. Then demolish! Its seems to have been well received!
Happy Baking!
