The Best Banana Cake in the World

Everyone has eaten banana cake before. Banana cake is like the cake that you will bake (and eat) at some point in your life - if any baking happened at all, that is. It is the cake to bake if you are in a hurry. It is the cake to bake if you are not a confident baker. It is the cake to bake just to remember home, remember your mum, remember how to bake.

It is a very helpful way of using up those over-ripe bananas too. Our house designer was coming over for a meeting tonight, and I had bananas that were so black and squishy that my housekeeper worriedly pointed them out to me this morning with a tut tut. So, banana cake it was.

The perfect banana cake for me is fluffy and moist, with small scattered squishes of banana in between, and a toasty nutty caramelized shell. No nuts required.

This recipe is by Carrie Ho from A Treasured Collection (2001). A few years ago, the ladies of Covenant Community Methodist Church in Singapore gathered together to collate their time-treasured recipes. It's a dying tradition, but church gatherings used to be fed with food lovingly prepared by its members. Nowadays we cater (still lovingly) fried chicken, hotdogs and cookies. Call me old-fashioned, but I kinda miss those days and am fighting it tooth and nail!


RECIPE: THE BEST BANANA CAKE IN THE WORLD
Cooking time: 1 hour 15 mins
Serves: 8

Equipment -
1x 20 cm square baking pan (I used a pie pan last night. A decorative alternative is to use a bundt pan.)
Wax paper

A -
180 g / 6 oz Butter
180 g / 6 oz Sugar

B -
2 tbsp Sour cream
1 tsp Vanilla essence

C -
3 Large eggs (60g each)

D -
210 g / 7.5 oz Self-raising flour, sifted
4 Large ripe bananas or 8 Small ripe bananas, mashed with a fork

*****

Pre-heat oven to 170 C / 340 F. Grease and line baking pan. Dust with flour.

A - Cream butter and sugar together till light and fluffy. I use the flat paddle for this.

B - Add sour cream and vanilla essence to A.

C - Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. I switch to the egg beater for this.

D - Fold in sifted flour and bananas gradually into the mixture. I do this manually with a flat spatula. Pour mixture into baking pan and bake for 1 hour. Then cover cake with foil and bake for another 10 mins. Remove from oven and let cake stand for 5 mins before taking it out. Cool on wire rack for at least another 10 mins before serving.

You can serve it with dusted icing sugar or a simple sour cream frosting.