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I sometimes wake up in the night when things that bother me become larger in the dark and the quiet. Once the noise in my head starts I have to get up, so I found myself in the kitchen early this morning, staring at a bunch of overripe bananas. It’s a rare thing to find anything overripe in my fruit bowl, especially with four children in the house, but when a banana has travelled over 5,000 miles to reach your fruit bowl it just seems criminal to throw it away when it gets overripe, especially considering that the riper it is then the sweeter a banana cake will be. Likewise, I hate to waste my old unrefreshed sourdough starter, so this banana cake combines the best of all possible worlds. So I chased my worries away mixing soft brown sugar, ripe banana’s, spices and old sourdough and made this sourdough banana cake. There is nothing quite like a cup of tea and a slice of cake and daylight to put the world in perspective. The cake was delicious but does improve no end if you can leave it to settle for 24 hours (if you can find somewhere to hide it.)
I used a Bundt tin for this recipe.
Ingredients
- 145g unsalted butter, softened
- 250g soft brown Fairtrade sugar
- 2 large free-range eggs
- 2 teaspoons baking powder
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 2 teaspoons ground cardamom
- 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
- 1 teaspoon grated nutmeg
- 1 teaspoon vanilla powder
- 300g plain organic stoneground flour
- 5 ripe fair trade bananas, mashed
- 100g unrefreshed sourdough starter
- some fair trade icing and cocoa powder for dusting.
Preheat the oven to 180C (160C fan-assisted)/350F/gas mark 4. Put the butter and sugar in a large mixing bowl and beat until light and fluffy. Add the eggs and a tablespoon of flour and mix. In a separate bowl mix together the baking powder, salt, spices and flour, then add this into the egg mixture.
Add the mashed bananas and sourdough starter and mix well. Spoon the mixture into a tin that has been greased with butter and dusted with flour. Bake in the preheated oven for 1 hour and 20 minutes, or until a metal skewer that is inserted in the centre comes out clean. (If the cake is not cooked in the centre but seems to be cooking too fast on the top cover with foil and bake for a bit longer.)
Once cooled, turn out onto a wire rack and serve dusted in icing sugar. Banana bread is always much nicer if you can leave it for a day.