Banana & Sunken Chocolate Cake

Within an hour of writing my last blog post for fluffy banana pancakes I made this cake. Auto suggestion or potassium deficiency? Hard to say.

This cake is delicious, quick and easy – the perfect threesome in my kitchen. It’s the kind of cake you look forward to with a cuppa mid afternoon, not too fancy but still a little bit indulgent. I made it to use up a couple brown bananas which were lurking on my counter top but I fancied something less worthy than a banana loaf. Hello sunken chocolate chunks.

This would be just as fabulous with dark chocolate (my kids aren’t keen) or white chocolate (I’m not keen) or indeed a mixture of dark, white and milk.

Ingredients

• 125g butter
• 150g caster sugar
• 2 large bananas, mashed
• 2 large eggs
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 175g self-raising flour
• 150g milk chocolate, chopped into chunks

Method

• Before you start, heat your oven to 180 or 170 fan / gas mark 4. Grease and line a round cake tin, preferably with a loose bottom for easy release later on.
• Melt your butter, then remove from the heat and whisk in the sugar.
• Next mix in the mashed banana and vanilla before whisking in the eggs one at a time.
• Add half the flour and mix well, then mix in the rest of the flour and the chocolate chunks.
• Scrape into the waiting tin and bake for 40 minutes. Check that the cake is golden and a skewer comes out clean (if it doesn’t, just pop it back in the oven and check every 5 minutes).
• Leave to stand on a cooling rack for a while before turning out.