Tropicana Banana Cake

This banana cake with tropical flavours is another Dan Lepard recipe which I've used, and written about, before. As the years go by, the flavour of this cake varies according to whatever semi-dried exotic fruits I can get hold of - this year I used apricots, pineapple and mango - as fashion in dried fruit seems to change quite quickly. I bought dried mandarins, intending to add them too, but although I loved the taste, their texture didn't seem right for a cake.

As well as exotic fruit, the other flavours added to this cake are coconut and orange, and some ground  almonds are used too, to keep the cake moist. The method for making the cake is a little tricky, and this is one time when it pays off to be well organised and have all the ingredients prepared and laid out in a logical arrangement before you start mixing.

As I've noted previously, the cake takes quite a bit longer to bake than suggested in the recipe - I added at least another 20 minutes before I was happy that the cake was fully cooked. The raw batter also almost fills a standard 2lb (900g) loaf tin, so if you've something slightly larger, it might be less worrisome to use that - I kept checking the oven, expecting to see the rising batter overflowing the tin.

Because I was taking this cake to a meeting of my local Cake Club (a replacement for the active branch of the Clandestine Cake Club, which now only exists on Facebook) I decided to pretty it up with a very light drizzle of orange glacé icing, made with icing sugar and some of the juice from the orange which provided the zest for the cake.

Everyone loved this cake - the blend of flavours worked really well with the dominant flavour being the coconut (although it wasn't overwhelming), the fruit was soft and chewy and the texture of the crumb was tender and moist.

There was one other banana loaf cake at the cake club - this one had added raspberries and chocolate chunks - along with several cakes based on lemon, a chocolate and vanilla marble cake, a custard slice and an apple and pecan cake. Now that the rules of the Clandestine Cake club don't apply, and we're not limited to large cakes, we hope to get more variety at future meetings, as pastries, biscuits and small cakes can be made - anything edible really!

Tropicana Banana Cake

- revisited for Formula 1 Foods

Although blogging about my baking has made me more adventurous, one of my frequent regrets is that I don't get a chance to remake things that I really liked first time around. It's one of the penalties of always looking for something new; although I often make flavour adaptions of good recipes, so that they are a little bit different the second time around, some recipes inevitably fall by the wayside. This was true of this Dan Lepard recipe, which he calls Tropicana Banana Cake (for the totally tropical taste, I guess!). I made the cake back when the recipe was originally published in 2009, noted my dislike of the very sugary tropical fruit mixture I'd chosen, and then almost forgot about it.

I say almost, because when Caroline of Caroline Makes started her Formula 1 Foods challenge at the beginning of the month, this was the first thing I thought of for the Malaysia leg of the journey around the world. The idea behind the challenge is that we make something inspired by the country where the current Formula 1 Grand Prix race is taking place. Caroline often bakes while her partner watches the GP, as it doesn't interest her, and thought there might be others in the same situation. I do actually watch the races, although they are not as interesting as they used to be (and a snooze on a Sunday afternoon, in front of the TV, is no bad thing if the race gets too boring), but thought the challenge sounded fun.

I looked at recipes for traditional baked sweet treats originating in Malaysia, but didn't think any of them were quite within my capabilities or budget. Pineapple tarts looked delicious but most recipes used 3 or 4 pineapples cooked down with sugar to a solid mass, which was then formed into balls and put into pastry cases. However, what all the recipes had in common was their use of the tropical fruits of the area, which brings us back to the Tropicana Banana Cake. This contains banana(!), coconut, pineapple, mango, papaya and orange - what could be more evocative of the tropical far East?

This time I managed to find soft dried mango and pineapple which had been dried without adding any sugar, but the papaya had been processed with a lot of extra sugar, so I only used a small amount of that. The 175g of dried fruit needed was made up of 70g each of mango and pineapple and 35g of papaya. I followed the recipe exactly - it's a slightly unusual method but it does give the good results promised by Dan Lepard.

The cake was as good as I remembered - a subtle blending of all the added flavours, with coconut as the predominant flavour, and a light, but moist, tender crumb. The added bonus, for me this time, was that the fruit stayed evenly distributed throughout the cake - last time the sugar heavy fruit pieces sank dramatically.

Tropical Tiffin

AKA Chocolate Refrigerator Cake

This was another attempt to make use of some of the Dorset Cereal's Chocolate Granola which I received a few weeks ago, after winning a blog competition. We've been eating it as a dessert, sprinkled on top of yogurt, but we're not getting through it fast enough! I teamed it with some of the odds and ends in the store cupboard, such as dried exotic fruits, coconut and ginger, to make a refrigerator cake with a tropical flavour. Refrigerator Cakes are usually made with broken biscuits, but I couldn't see any reason why Granola shouldn't work instead.

Ingredients

300g plain chocolate (at least 70% cocoa solids)

4 tablespoons golden syrup

100g unsalted butter

250g Dorset Cereal Chocolate Granola

200g exotic dried fruit*

30g desiccated coconut

50g chopped walnuts

3 nuggets of preserved stem ginger, chopped

* I used 50g dried apricots, 50g dried physallis and 100g of a semi-dried sweetened mix of papaya, mango, pineapple and melon

Method

Line a 8" square shallow cake tin with one sheet of baking parchment, folding it into the corners so that it comes up the sides of the tin too.

Melt the chocolate, golden syrup and butter together, in a large bowl over a pan of simmering water.

When the chocolate and butter have melted, stir in all the other ingredients, then transfer the mixture to the tin and level out.

Cool a little then refrigerate until the chocolate has set. Use a sharp knife to cut into small squares and store in the refrigerator in an airtight container.

I found this very rich, so cut it into 2cm squares - smaller squares means less handling while eating too, so it's less messy! Although the Tiffin had a great flavour, I think it would have been better made with broken biscuits, as usual, as they would have added more crispness to the texture.

Tropicana Banana Cake

You can tell how tempting this recipe is - published on Saturday, in the Guardian Weekend magazine; baked on Monday afternoon as soon as the ingredients were acquired. Another Dan Lepard recipe, no surprise there!

Although it's an unusual method, it's not difficult if you plan ahead and have everything weighed out in advance, in little bowls. Sometimes you do need to be organised and careful! The only 'problem' I encountered was that the cake took a lot longer to bake than suggested in the recipe, but I put this down to my loaf tin probably being a different shape. I often have timing problems with loaf cakes - my 2lb tin is short and deep, so a cake will take longer to bake than in a longer, more shallow tin. This cake took 25 minutes longer, and I covered it with a piece of foil for that extra time to prevent it getting too dark.

There are lots of flavours in this cake - almonds, banana, orange, coconut, tropical fruit - and they all come together nicely to create a very subtle, well balanced, delicately flavoured cake, with a moist delicate crumb, as promised. No one flavour predominates, although the orange and coconut are recognisable, and biting into the pieces of tropical fruit gives little bursts of other flavours - in this case pineapple, papaya, mango and melon. I didn't taste the banana at all, but someone who doesn't like bananas might notice it.



If I have any criticism, it's that I wasn't happy with sticky, soft texture of the Tropical Fruit mix - I used Waitrose own brand 'Tropical Fruit Medley'. It was the only tropical mix I could find which was only semi-dried, but it had a lot of added sugar - more than 50%. It's clear from the photo, too, that the weight of this sugar dense fruit has made the pieces sink through the batter, rather than being evenly distributed. I think next time I make this, I will use soft dried pears or apricots and leave the word 'tropical' out of the name.