Light Banana Cake

The only recipe you need for your old bananas! Lighter than banana bread, this banana cake bakes up beautifully as cupcakes, sheet cake or a layer cake.

Hands up if you’ve had this experience: You buy a bunch of bananas. The family eats them all, every last one, in about two days. You buy another bunch of bananas. These remain largely untouched until they are deemed too speckled-brown to eat. Yeah, I figured I was not the only one.

When my girls were little, I made banana bread out of the old bananas. It suffered a similar fate to its main ingredient. Fresh out of the oven, everyone LOVED banana bread. Everyone wanted a warm slice or two. The next day, it might as well have had a poison label attached. Outcast, has-been, rejected. Until I discovered banana CAKE. It’s lighter, fluffier, more desirable apparently, than banana bread. This one they’ll eat for a couple of days, until it’s gone.

Ingredients

2 1/4 cups or 280g flour
1 cup or 225g sugar
1 1/2 cups (3-4) well-ripe bananas
1/2 cup or 115g butter or canola oil
2 eggs, preferably room temperature
2 1/2 teaspoons double-acting baking powder
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon baking soda or bicarbonate of soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
Confectioners' or powdered sugar to serve

Method
Preheat oven to 375°F or 190°C.

Grease and flour the bottom and sides of your baking pan/s. (Two 8-in round, one 9X12-in rectangle or one 12-muffin tin plus one 6-muffin tin)

Into large bowl, put your peeled bananas. Give them a quick whirl to mash.

Now measure all the other ingredients (except the powdered sugar) into the bowl.With mixer at low speed, beat until well mixed, scraping the bowl often.

Now beat on high for five minutes, occasionally stopping to scrape the bowl again.
Pour batter into pan/s and bake for 20-30 minutes or until toothpick inserted into center of cake or muffins comes out clean.

Cool cake/s for 10 minutes and then turn out of pan/s.

Serve sprinkled with confectioners’ or powdered sugar.

Enjoy!