Sticky Banana and Date Cake

An easy cake you can use for afternoon tea, as a pudding, or make into a muffin for a snack! I baked mine in a loaf tin so we could slice it up and have it with a cup of tea. There was, however, some cake mixture left, so I piled it into two deep cake cases and baked those too; they came out like perfect muffins. The original recipe is for puddings baked in dariole moulds, and also includes a runny chocolate ganache in the middle of each one that turns gooey in the oven. Since I wasn’t cooking mine for dessert, I left this out.

I took the idea from last weekend’s ‘Something for the Weekend’, and it’s another Simon Rimmer recipe: Sticky Banana Pudding.

The mixture is a basic cake mix, see my plain sponge, with one less egg. The extra moisture needed is more than made up for with the four mashed bananas and 175g dates, cooked down first with water and a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda. I also added a little more flour as the mixture was very sloppy, and the cake in the tin needed another 25 minutes cooking time. As a cake, it is very sticky and squishy, but this is what would be expected in a pudding, as it was originally created to be! That didn’t stop us from eating them straight from the oven, trying not to burn our fingers as we pushed bite after bite into our mouths!