I am shopping to my last joule of energy these days, less than a week to fly back home. I have always enjoyed shopping but since I have moved abroad, this craze has gone worst. From clothes to eatables to placemats to what not, I am afraid I will have to pay for excess baggage. This weekend, my pace of spending bucks was slowed down by heavy rain storms. News say that Karachi hasn’t witnessed such rain in thirty years and rain it was which bought break to summer spell (and electricity supply), not only washed off pollution and dust but also caused a lot of disaster to some underdeveloped areas. Though I love rain season but the destruction it brought with it this time was extremely painful. While I was busy taking some outdoor shots, Mum was busy in making traditional ‘rain food’ called ‘pakoras’ in Urdu, dumplings made from chickpeas powder mixed with spices and onions.
Since we were home ridden for most of the time it was raining, my baking was in full swing. I tried lot of things, some alone, some with my sister. Dry Fruit cake which my father absolutely loves, pin wheel cookies, lemon tarts and banana cake on my mother’s wish. All these recipes will be posted soon along with some nice baking and food shopping I did. For this week, here is Banana cake. The recipe which I had, called for yogurt which was not available so I did a quick search for some another recipe which contain ingredients that I had. And I am glad I did. Found a very good recipe from Gin’s blog. I made only two changes, reduced the two and a half cups of sugar to two as bananas I had were very riped and quite sweet and added chopped walnuts. I also did’nt had almond and banana extract. Rest of the recipe was pretty straightforward.
Ingredients:
Riped, mashed bananas 1 1/2 cup
Juice of 1 lemon
Flour 3 cups
Baking soda 2 tsp
Salt 1/4 tsp
Softened butter 1 cup
Castor sugar 2 cups
Eggs 3
Almond essence 1 tsp (optional)
Banana essenece 2 tbsp (optional)
Buttermilk 1 1/2 cups (Or add 1 1/2 tbsp of lemon juice to 1 1/2 cups of full fat milk)
Method:
- Cream butter and sugar.
- Add in eggs, one at a time and continue beating.
- Sift flour, baking soda, salt. Add in nuts.
- Mix lemon juice with extracts and mashed bananas. Keep aside.
- Alternately add flour mixture and buttermilk while beating continuously.
- Lastly add in banana mixture.
- Spread the mixture into 16 x 8 inches greased rectangular sheet pan.
- Bake in pre-heated oven for approx. 1 hour at gas mark 4. until golden brown.
- Cool before cutting squares.
- Frost with cream cheese frosting if desired.
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