Banana Bread 'Café Style'

The Sandifords in Sydney introduced us to banana bread on the barbie, which is complete heaven, even for someone like me who is almost phobic of bananas. Amazing what lots of sugar and fat can do for something. The banana bread they subscribed to was 'Café Style' banana bread from a particular branch of Coles, and we can't find it anywhere else. I have missed it but it was only when Jenny suggested using up some brown bananas in a banana cake that I thought OOoo. And got on the case of recreating it.

The internet is a wonderful thing for so many reasons, one of which being that someone like me who can't seem to manage to follow a recipe without changing something, and who needs to know how essential each ingredient and its proportions are, can quickly find 20 recipes, compare them, and merge them into something she feels she will enjoy the best. Well, more usually, that will fit the ingredients she happens to have at the time.

I was pretty damn pleased with what I concocted:

As were Zappa, Ben and his friend Caleb.

Emma's Café Style Banana Bread

125g softened unsalted butter

1 cup of brown sugar

2 eggs

1 cup of mashed ripe banana (I used 2 big ones. Apparently if you leave mashed banana for 10 minutes it goes brown, making your cake darker and yummier-looking)

few drops of vanilla extract

2 cups of plain flour (works well with gluten free)

1 tsp bicarb soda

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 tsp ground cinnamon (maybe a whole one if you're that way inclined)

1/8 tsp ground allspice

1/2 cup of sour cream, yoghurt or a mixture

- preheat oven to 180c and grease tin.

- cream butter and sugar until fluffy and pale, then beat in banana first, vanilla and eggs. Might be a bit lumpy. Don't think it matters.

- sift dry ingredients and add to mixture alternately with yogurty stuff. mix until thick, smooth and creamy.

- pour into whatever tin/s you are using and bake for about 55 minutes or until cake tests clean when skewered. the cake should be nicely browned on the top, and will probably be cracked. this crevasse is a good thing.

The trouble with it is that it doesn't slice well. At all. Especially not when it's just come out of the oven, which is when you want to eat it most. Don't be fooled by the picture, that's the end slice. I found myself wondering about the electric carving knife I saw in a cupboard somewhere.

I like my slice best dry fried in a non-stick frying pan, and here I experimented with having it with thick yoghurt, which was yum. Zappa likes frying his in butter, then putting butter on it. One of the online recipe authors liked it with a dollop of ricotta which sounds divine, but just happening to have ricotta lying about in your fridge is far too naughty for most of us.