Skip to main content

Banana Cake. Peanut Streusel.



I love baking Plain Jane cakes. The ones you can whip up quickly in a bowl and the ones where you do not need to fuss about frostings and such. I specially like the kinds you can bake on a weekend and leave in the fridge to snack on during the week.

The brown butter banana cake from food52 checks all the boxes. As an added bonus, there is no need to even bring out a whip; you only need a blender or a food processor. The original recipe is for a loaf cake but I adapted mine to fit a 6 inch springform pan. If you are comparing recipes, you will notice that my cake recipe is halved but I kept the full recipe for peanut streusel. That's because the peanuts and oats add a real crunch and more is really a lot better in this case.

Here's the easy breezy way to get your cake fix.

Ingredients
For Streusel
40 grams butter (I use salted Amul butter)
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/3 cup oats
2/3 cup salted, roasted peanuts

For cake
50 grams butter (I use salted Amul butter)
1 cup minus 2 tbsp plain flour (measure a cup, then take out 2 tbsp)
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp baking powder
1 ripe banana
1 egg
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup yogurt
1 tbsp cointreau (or orange juice)
1 tsp vanilla extract

Line the base of a 6 inch springform pan with parchment paper. Preheat the oven to 180 C.

First make the streusel. Chop the peanuts or pulse them in a spice grinder until coarsely chopped.

Mix the peanuts with oats and sugar. Melt the butter, pour on top of the other ingredients and mix until the whole thing resembles mortar. Set aside.

On to the cake now. In a small pan, melt the butter. Once it melts, reduce the heat but let the whole thing sizzle around for 4-5 minutes until the brown bits separate and fall to the bottom of the pan. Let cool while you get to the rest of your cake batter.

Mix together the flour, baking powder and baking soda in a large bowl. Slice the banana and put into your food processor or blender alongwith the egg, sugar, yogurt, cointreau and vanilla essence. The browned butter should be cool to touch by now; add that too and pulse until everything is well blended and you don't see any banana pieces.

Pour this blend over the dry ingredient and mix just until there are no streaks of flour. This is a fairly wet batter so you can just spoon or pour the whole thing into your prepared pan. Scatter the streusel all over the top of the batter. Bake for 40 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the centre of the cake comes out clean.

Let cool for 15-20 minutes before you unmould, then cool completely over a wire rack.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I've found my perfect cookie

It's a bite sized cookie, with flavors of a pie, shape of a croissant and a pretty, pretty name. It's Rugelach. I first heard of this cookie when it became the baking pick for Tuesdays with Dorrie a couple of months back. The looks, the concept - everything was fascinating. And I've dreamed of making this cookie ever since. I ditched hundreds of recipes floating around and went straight to the master. It's Dorie Greenspan's recipe that I used, and ain't I glad I got it so perfect the very first time. So what's rugelach? It's cream-cheese pastry dough, rolled then cut into wedges, spread with jam and sugar and fillings of choice, rolled into crescents and baked. First the dough. Dorie did it in her processor, but I just went and did it by hand. Put 100 gms cream cheese and 100 gms butter out of the fridge until they were soft but still cold. Added both to a cup of plain flour (I omitted the salt because I use salted butter). Rubbed the flour and but...
10 comments
Read more

Mystery Fruit

This only happened a few times every year, just when the rainy season kicked in. A street hawker will come by, straw basket on head. He will yell "kaul chapni" and I will run out to buy a bundle of these. Stuck together like flowers, they looked like a bouquet. Every hole contains a little fruit. You break out the package, peel the tiny fruit that pops out and eat it. Done slowly, it can take you an hour to eat an head. Or did, when I was about 12 years old. That was the last time I saw this fruit. I've never seen it again, didn't even know what it was called or where it came from. Three weeks back, Vikram Doctor wrote about a store in Khar that sells Sindhi foods. He described this fruit and I knew it came from my vivid childhood memories. And finally, I knew we were talking about lotus fruit. Now talk about coincidences. Last weekend, I was passing by a lane in Bandra and for the first time in many, many years I saw the straw basket filled with my mytery fru...
14 comments
Read more

Of Brun and Bun Maska

There is more to Bombay's breads than the pao that goes into pao bhaji and vada pao. There's Brun. and there's bun. We will get there. First, you have to get to know the city's Parsis. And Iranis, who are also Zoroastrians, but came to city a little later, in the late 19th or early 20th century. And when they came, they brought with them these little cafes that dot the city. I am no expert on Irani chai cafes. And I can't tell you whether Yazdani Bakery will provide you the best experience or Kyani's. But I can tell you a few things you need to ignore when you get there. Appearances don't matter; so ignore the fact that the marble/glass top tables and the wooden chairs look a bit dilapidated. Also ignore the rundown look the place sports. Instead, get yourself settled. And order a bun muska. This one's familiar to you as a first cousin of the soft hamburger bun. It's similar, but just a tad bit sweeter. Maska, of course, is the generous dollop o...
13 comments
Read more