Moist Banana Cake
This is lovely and moist. I found using 1/2 cup firmly packed brown sugar gave it a slight caramel flavour. Great warm with butter on top.
This is lovely and moist. I found using 1/2 cup firmly packed brown sugar gave it a slight caramel flavour. Great warm with butter on top.
- Carbohydrate 53.1940195211885 g
- Cholesterol 0.375 mg
- Fat 0.466396078355602 g
- Fiber 1.70301482483616 g
- Protein 2.64371645869784 g
- Saturated Fat 0.151011310378106 g
- Serving Size 1 1 Serving (97g)
- Sodium 345.549118053211 mg
- Sugar 51.4910046963523 g
- Trans Fat 0.129660742344116 g
- Calories 221 calories
Step-by-step
- Preheat oven to 190°C.
- Cream butter and sugar in a bowl until it turns a light colour. Gradually add beaten eggs one at a time.
- Mash banana on a plate with vanilla essence/extract and sprinkle with ground ginger and/or cinnamon and mix through.
- Mix bicarb soda in a cup with the milk.
- Add mashed banana mixture into creamed butter and sugar and mix until combined.
- Add milk and flour to banana mixture and combine.
- Pour into a greased and lined loaf tin and bake for 45 minutes or until skewer comes back clean. Cool on cake rack.
Unlike traditional pound cakes that rely on equal weights of flour, butter, and sugar, a banana cake incorporates dense fruit purée into the batter, requiring deliberate adjustments when altering batch sizes. Scaling the volume of wet ingredients up or down does not scale the leavening agents linearly; doubling the bicarb soda alongside the milk can easily introduce a soapy, metallic off-flavor if not balanced precisely against the acidity of the bananas. Using brown sugar alongside caster sugar introduces molasses, which hygroscopically binds water molecules more tightly than refined sucrose, yielding a dense crumb that retains its moisture over a multi-day storage window at room temperature. Historical variants of this tea cake emerged as bakers sought practical uses for overripe fruit, relying on the natural starch-to-sugar conversion of darkening peels to sweeten the crumb without requiring excessive added sucrose. Baking this batter in a standard loaf tin at 190 degrees Celsius ensures the exterior sets before the internal gases expand past the structural capacity of the gluten network.
