Heartwarming Stories, Soulful Food : Gooey Banana Walnut Cake

My interest in cooking is very recent. For starters the NEED to cook led me to get on with the pots and pans. Secondly my love for food left me with no choice but to simply just make what I felt like eating. Thirdly Masterchef Australia happens to be my favourite show on television.

Put the three together and you have me every day at 6.30 pm browsing for recipes to get home and try.

For someone who hated the kitchen, it is quite a three sixty degree change. 

As I started to cook, I realised how something inside me started to change. Cooking for me has become therapeutic and also saves me a lot of money in eating out!

I have been meaning to put down some of my recipes (actually, my versions of recipes I pick up here and there) with a story that leads to each one and honestly I was never confident. 

But something strange happened yesterday. I picked up a new baking tin from the supermarket and while I was putting down the shopping bags on the kitchen counter I noticed that two bananas were over ripe and had to be consumed immediately. 

So instead of throwing them or eating them, an idea of a banana cake popped into my head. Now, for a really really amateur cook like me, who keeps referring to recipes while cooking, something that came up by instinct was a breakthrough. 

I could feel the flavour of the cake, how I wanted it to taste like a banana muffin I had eaten before, but I wanted to be much gooier. That’s when I knew, if this turned out well, I will write about my cooking adventures because my palette for cooking has obviously started to develop as much as my palette for eating it.....Walk with me while I learn, experiment and start to love the world of cooking! 

So here goes my recipe for a Gooey Banana Walnut Cake: 

What you need -

• 170 gms self raising flour
•  170 gms castor sugar
• 170 gms I know, its butter but it makes it so much yummier. I used desi Amul butter which is salted, next time I will go for unsalted butter or margarine though
• 3 eggs
• 5-6 drops of vanilla essence
• 2 mashed bananas
• A handful of chopped walnuts
• Baking tin – grease it with some butter and then throw in some flour (an old trick my mum taught me)

 What you do –

• Pre-heat the oven to around 120 degrees (I use the gas mark which is somewhere between 2and 3)
• Just dump all the ingredients (except the walnuts) into a bowl and either use a food processor or a hand blender to blend it into a smooth mixture
• When the mixture is smooth add the walnuts and mix it well in the mixture
• Pour into the greased tin and dump it in the oven for around 50 minutes
• You will know when the sweet aroma of butter and bananas start to fill your home that the banana walnut cake is done!

What I will (and you could perhaps) do next time –

• Sprinkle some cinnamon on the cake
• Adding some cooking chocolate, perhaps try this with muffins

This is the kind of cake you just can’t have one piece of. Enjoy it as a snack on the go or with a steaming cup of tea. 

Happy eating :)