I recently tried a chocolate cake which was made used bran flakes. At first I was a little sceptical and thought that It would never live up to a good old fashioned chocolate cake, but I was pleasantly surprised. The cake was moist and light and you could taste the bran at all. There was a slightly different texture but it wasn't unpleasant and after the second bite you sort of forgot about it.
This got me thinking could you make cake with other cereals such as oats or wheat based cereals. To my surprise I did a little research on the good old world wide web to find that there is a whole new world of cake baking using cereals. This made me want to don my pinny straight away and start baking.
I decided to make a banana and Weetabix cake as I had a couple of ripe bananas and a few weetabix that were looking all lonely on their own amongst my other cereals.
Most of the recipes I do used metric measurements but for a change i was going to tackle this cake with the American way of baking by doing my measurements in cups. I am lucky to have a set of measuring cups but if you don't then most jugs these days have cup measurements on the side.
Ingredients
4 Weetabix
2 ripe bananas
2 cups of self raising flour
1/2 cup of milk
1/2 cup of brown sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon of ground Cinnamon
To start with I soaked the Weetabix in the milk for a minute then mashed with a fork. I then chopped up the banana and began mashing this is into the Weetabix, but I gave up with the fork and just got my hands in so that the banana was well incorporated, much fun was had.
I then broke all my rules when it comes to baking and basically put all the other ingredients into the bowl and mixed with a wooden spoon until all the ingredients were incorporated. I didn't even sieve the flour!
This mixture looked as if it would fit nicely into a 1lb loaf tin, so I lightly greased my trusty old tin and gently poured in the mixture. Admittedly at this stage it didn't look very appetising but my fingers were crossed (and sticky) and off it went into a hot oven gas mark 5/180c for 30 minutes.
After 30 minutes the cake was lovely and brown and I checked to see if it was cooked by inserting a skewer. The skewer came out sticky which normally would mean that the cake needed longer. In this case though I remembered that bananas don't set when cooked and will remain sticky, so I used my cake baking experience to say......."your done"
I let the cake have half an hour to cool down and my mouth was watering. I couldn't wait to see if my creation had worked, and to my surprise it did. It tasted absolutely fabulous and adding the Cinnamon really gave the cake a depth of flavour.
My only criticism is that it is slightly doughy and could of possibly done with 5-10 minutes longer and I think next time I would add a good handful of raisins to give little pockets of sweetness.
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