Three months ago I decided to bake a cake after a long period of absence from the kitchen. I went to our local provision store to find that butter was “out of stock”, which was weird. I thought that the shop was just out of butter temporarily and will have it the next day so I proceeded to another, larger store. Same response. After the fifteenth store, I gave up. I went to the milk distribution company outlet to ask for butter and the guy at the counter told me that the slab of butter I am getting is the LAST one in stock. There has been no supply for about six weeks.

Cake, Cut up

I was disheartened. To the core. I had spent the last few days looking for a good cake which is not too rich, is sweet and has a good texture. These cakes require unsalted butter which, unfortunately is a “specialty product” in my city(or India, I am not sure about the rest of the country). The only unsalted butter I could find was Lurpak which is imported from Denmark and is hideously expensive(about 4 us$ for 150gm compared to the usual butter which is 50c for 100gm).

I took my slab of salted(unfortunately) butter and headed home to bake a cake. The cake I finalized was from a recipe I found on the website www.justhungry.com

The cake is not very sweet, has mashed bananas with some coconut sprinkled over it.  Indian households are a little reserved when it comes to experimental/fusion food so they are a bit skeptical while trying new things. This cake tastes a bit like “Burfi” (or Barfi, however you wish to spell it) so it was a hit! The texture might be a little weird because of the salted butter but it makes a wonderful cake which tastes awesome with some jasmine tea!

The Recipe:

Ingredients:

2  eggs (at room temperature)
100gm unsalted butter(regular salted butter will do too)
100gm  all-purpose flour(Maida)
80gm brown sugar (you may want to experiment with shakkar)
1 teaspoon baking powder
3  ripe bananas, cut up into smallish pieces or mashed
1 tablespoon Rum
1 teaspoon Vanilla essence
2 Ttablespoons milk
4 tablespoons grated coconut
extra butter for greasing the pan

Method:

Preheat the oven(OTG, not Microwave) to 180 °C
Grease the baking pan and line with cooking/butter paper/parchment, OR rub the pan with butter and then sprinkle flour on it
Melt the butter for the cake batter
Mix together the flour and baking powder.
Mix the butter and sugar with an electric whisk or manually until it is fluffy. Add the eggs and whisk some more. Add the rum and essence and milk.
Now fold in the flour and baking powder and fold in the bananas. Don’t overmix.
Pour the batter into the greased baking pan. Sprinkle the top with the dessicted coconut.  Place the pan onto the lowermost baking shelf.
Bake for about 45 minutes or until a knife/skewer inserted in the center comes out clean.
Please note that the coconut crumbs may keep sticking to the skewer/knife while checking so make sure that you check for the cake, not the coconut crumbs.

P.S. I have modified the recipe a bit so it is easy to measure/find ingredients.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 7th, 2010 at 4:56 am and is filed under Bakes, Beans and such. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.