Cake! Everybody loves cake!

A couple of days ago I rescued a pair of sad brown bananas, destined to be chucked out, from a friend's fruit bowl and yesterday evening I made Banana Ginger Cake from the Australian Woman's Weekly Cakes and Slices Cookbook.

Banana Ginger Cake

90g butter

2 tbsp golden syrup

1/4 cup caster sugar

1/4 cup brown sugar

1 egg

2/3 cup mashed banana (two bananas)

1 1/2 cups self raising flour

1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda

2 tsp ground ginger

1 tbsp milk

Lemon Frosting

1 1/2 cups icing sugar

30g butter

approx 2 tbsp lemon juice

1/4 cup chopped glace ginger

Grease a 20cm ring pan, line with paper and grease paper.

Cream butter, syrup and sugars with electric mixer until light and fluffy.  Add egg and beat until combined then beat in banana.  Stir in sifted ingredients and milk.  Pour into prepared pan and bake in moderate oven 180 or gas mark 4)  for about 45 minutes.  Stand for 5 minutes before turning out onto wire rack to cool.  Spread cold cake with frosting and sprinkle with ginger.

Keeps for two days.

Lemon Frosting

Combine icing sugar and butter with enough lemon juice to mix to a spreadable consistency.

Ok, with my customary randomness I didn't entirely follow the recipe to the letter!  ;o)  I couldn't find my round cake tin so I used a rectangle one instead, probably about 10" x 6", consequently as it was shallower the cake only took 30 minutes to cook.  I mixed by hand as I don't have an electric mixer.  For the icing, I didn't have a lemon so I used lime juice instead and I didn't have glace ginger so I substituted stem ginger instead.  Creative baking in action!  lol  My husband had two slices of cake last night so that's a thumbs up from him!

Playing Catch Up

It's been soooooo long since I've done any foodie blogging!  ;o(  In between rehearsing & performing, illness and work I just haven't found time to even do much cooking much less blog about it!  Booooooo!  Anyhoo, I'm here now and hope not to have such a lengthy gap between posts again!

Today I made a big pan of tomato and veg soup.  ;o)  It's a good hearty beast of a soup with a plethora of veg....onion, mushroom, carrot, potato, celery and cabbage and plenty of tomato juice.  I picked up a soup book from the library this afternoon and there's some interesting soups in it, new and different recipes to try out.  Yum!

At the weekend we had a lovely roast chicken dinner, haven't had a roast in a while and I did the full shebang...roast chicken, roast potatoes, pigs in blankets, cauliflower & leek cheese, sage & onion stuffing, sweetcorn and gravy.  Mmmmmmmm!  It's been too long!  The chicken was an organic one from the supplier I get my organic veg box from (they started doing meat earlier this year) and when I unwrapped it I was surprised to find that it had giblets!  Shock horror!  I can't remember the last time I saw a chicken on a supermarket shelf that had giblets.  Years ago you used to have a choice when buying a chicken, with or without giblets but nowadays giblets aren't on offer at all.  A friend suggested to me that it's because most people don't know what to do with them and, sadly, I'm inclined to agree.  Anyway, I used said giblets to make some extra yummy stock and it's now residing in my freezer and will be the basis of some proper f**k off gravy at Christmas.  ;o) 

I'm easing back into baking regularly too which always makes me happy even if I can't partake of the end product!  ;o)  Last week I was in London for a couple of days and bought some star shaped silicone cake cases.  I have several sets of ordinary round silicone cake cases which I use all the time.  I'm not really sure of the ethical or health implications of cooking with silicone (I really should check that out!) but I do use my cases alot and the only down side is that my husband moans like billio about washing them!

Recently I've been looking through the wad of recipes I have torn from magazines, photocopied from books or scribbled onto random scraps of paper and wanting to try some of them out.  ;o)  I have a huge variety of things to try out, watch this space!

Lastly, if you haven't already tried out the Supercook website, as plugged on The Gadget Show, I can recommend giving it a whirl!  Bung in some ingredients and it'll search for recipes using said items, great fun!