cake du jour: special feature - banana bread returns

It is perhaps not such a good thing to have discovered that banana bread goes rather nicely with cheese.

I have today (in between interviewing roofers and contemplating the state of the garden) baked myself a loaf of banana bread. It is delicious, if a little flatter than one would expect. Luckily, I have several excellent excuses for the flatness of my banana bread:

Excuse number one: I used the wrong flour. Plumstead refuses to stock wholemeal flour choosing instead to offer a splendid range of Indian garam flour, so I resorted to wholemeal bread flour, which I knew in advance to be a mistake. I meant to put in some more raising agent but forgot.

Excuse number two: I have no scales. I'd forgotten that I gave my scales to my Mum because she admired them so much. I haven't got around to replacing them and didn't remember this until I got home from the land of cheap scales (the pound shop). I therefore had to convert the whole recipe to American measurements (tablespoons and cups) which was inordinately clever of me but definitely resulted in rather random measuring.

Excuse number three: I think the (pound shop) loaf tin was a bit big and I would have been better off with a half-pound one, but there wasn't one.

Excuse number four: This is the first cake I've baked in nigh on 15 years. I obviously need practise.

In the meantime the cake though slightly flat and rather breadier than I suspect it ought to be tastes bloody delicious. There's rather a lot of cake for one person and I was planning to give some to Erialc for her children to eat, but then I remembered that it has nuts in it and nuts are probably verboten*. I'll just have to eat it myself. It's lucky that I have put in a lot of training when it comes to cake eating and am up to the job.


*Erialc if you see this and are prepared to offer the babies nut-infested banana bread let me know. Let me know quite soon because you and I know just how fast I can eat cake :)