Last weekend our baby girl turned 1. Hip Hip Hooray! She is walking, loves eating real food (despite her 2 lonely bottom teeth) and is proving to be a bit of a diva with head-on-the-floor tantrums well and truly in place! Snuggles are on her terms, and she loves her big brother to bits.
We celebrated with an afternoon tea, with Skye Gyngell’ssponge cake with strawberries and cream. We were lucky enough to have more grandparents come and stay and help celebrate!
The rest of the week has been one of those weeks that it is best to focus on the fact that today was a good day with my beautiful children to remind me how great they are and its good to stay at home to reset the clock of an over emotional 3 year old. So we made cake! It also distracted me from the fact that I have a 17km ‘training’ run tomorrow morning in preparation for my half marathon in 8 days time. I promise to stop talking about it after next week!!!
Fruit and veges, specifically bananas seem to ripen and go past their state of prime deliciousness in a matter of days here. Bananas especially, and I dont like throwing them out, so I peel them and freeze them. They make awesome creamy smoothies and they also keep our household and work colleagues with a fairly steady flow of banana chocolate cake. It is the first cake I made when we moved to Dubai when we were staying in our temporary accommodation and had limited utensils. I was bored and unemployed and coming to terms with the escalating heat. I remembered a cake one of my sisters had delivered to our doorstep in Sydney one day just to be lovely. It was this fabulously delicious and easy cake.
It is virtually a 1 bowl cake, no electric things required, it just takes 45 minutes or so of baking and it is so moist there is no need for icing and it freezes well in slices too. In my sister’s words ‘its a winner’.
- Banana Chocolate Cake
- 3 large ripe bananas
- 2 cups of plain flour
- 2 teaspoons baking powder
- 1 cup of caster sugar
- 2 eggs
- 125g unsalted butter melted
- 1 cup of choc chips ( I used the Hersheys semisweet chips)
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract (I use vanilla bean paste)
- Preheat the oven to 180 degrees celcius (190 degrees in my gas oven)
- Grease and flour your loaf tin.
- In a bowl mash the bananas well with the vanilla.
- Add the 2 eggs lightly beaten with a fork.
- Pour in the butter which has cooled a little and mix well, I like to use my trusty wooden spoon.
- Add the flour, baking powder and choc chips and stir just until combined.
- Transfer to the tin and bake for 45 - 50 min or until a cake tester or skewer comes out clean. I sometimes turn the temperature down a little if it is browning too quickly on top and still needs a bit extra in the middle.
What a great party it was too! I love Spatular Man here!
-The blessed visiting granny.