Recipe for Banana, Blueberry and Walnut Cake

This recipe is the result of not being able to concentrate on my work and deciding I may as well do something else; like bake a cake.  Maybe I was inspired by watching the Bake Off last night (their cheesecakes were amazing!). I didn’t want to bake anything too complicated but remembered they made Madeira cakes a couple of weeks ago, so this is my adaption of a basic Madeira cake recipe.  We had a ripe banana and some blueberries that needed using, so I added these to the mix as well as some walnuts (I only added a few walnuts, you can add more or less depending on how much you like them!).

To make the cake you will need:
5oz / 125g butter
5oz / 125g caster sugar
3 eggs
8oz / 200g self-raising flour
1 ripe banana
handful of blueberries
handful of chopped walnuts

Method:
Heat the oven to 170C / 325 F / Gas Mark 3

Cream the butter and sugar.  Beat in the eggs with some of the flour, then fold in the remaining flour.

Mash the banana and stir into the mixture.  Then add the blueberries and chopped walnuts.

Place into a greased 22x11cm tin (approx. 8.5 x 4.25 inch), or a 18 – 20cm round tin (approx. 7 inch).

Bake for 55 mins – 1 hour, or until golden brown and when a skewer inserted into the cake comes out clean.  Leave to cool for 10 – 15 mins before turning out onto a wire rack to cool completely.

Hidden Star Cake

I did some more baking on the weekend – this time I baked a sponge with a hidden star in it.  I have seen cakes with hidden designs on the Great British Bake Off and Pinterest (including some amazingly detailed ones I have pinned here) and thought they looked so good but must be hard to do.  Making this cake with a star was actually quite simple – I’m so pleased with how it turned out!

First I baked a strawberry flavoured sponge, coloured with red food colouring.  When this was cool I used a star cookie cutter to cut the sponge, and arranged the stars in a ring inside a round sponge tin so that every slice of cake would look like the photo above.  I then filled the tin, covering the stars, with a vanilla sponge.  I’ve never double baked a sponge like this before and thought it might make the cake a bit dry, so was pleasantly surprised with the end result which tasted as good as it looked!

Here’s how the uncut cake looked, decorated with buttercream, fondant stars and sprinkles…

Have you ever baked a hidden surprise cake before - what design did you bake?

Some photos from the weekend…

Thought I would share some photos from my weekend with you...
I baked this cake…  It’s a madeira cake with dried apricots and glace cherries inside.   A recipe that we often use in my house, but with a little twist - I soaked, and warmed, the apricots in orange juice which I think made the apricots softer and the cake more moist.  I then saved the juice to make the icing, giving it a hint of orange / apricot flavour and delicate colour…

I also spent some time playing with Basil, my guinea pig – here he is enjoying his fruit and veg bag!There was a beautiful sunset yesterday – it wasn’t as dark as it appears in this photograph, but the colours of the sky show up better…

Summer Cake Bunting

The Great British Bake Off is back on tv again, inspiring my sister and I to bake!  In episode 1 the bakers had to make a cake with a hidden design inside so we thought we would try our own.  We decided to make a very simple cake compared to the ones on the Bake Off - ours was just three layers of sponge in graduated shades of green.


Between the layers of sponge are jam and buttercream.  The cake was then covered in ready to roll fondant icing.  We coloured a little fondant with pink food colouring to make some roses for the top.

One thing I really wanted to try out was some fancy piping with glace icing.  So I covered the cake in pale green piped swirls and leaves, it's a little time consuming but looks effective...

We finished off the cake with some mini bunting - it's really easy to make and looks fun on cakes! I used this template to cut pennants from my 'Cupcakes and Roses' themed printable scrapbooking paper...

To make the bunting you need:
paper pennants
some thread or ribbon
2 bamboo skewers

Fold the pennants in half, then lay out with the thread running along the inside fold and glue the two sides of the pennants together.  If you don't glue the thread you will be able to slide the pennants and spread them out evenly along the thread. Tie the ends of the thread to bamboo skewers and push into the cake.