Chocolate Banana Cake

As much as I went on and on about how chocolate cakes are overated in my last post, I do concede to their popularity. And I thought it’d be good to have a vegetarian chocolate cake recipe in my repertoire, you know, for emergencies and stuff. What emergency, you may ask? Well, ask any god-fearing chocoholic and I’m positive they can recount at least a COUPLE of urgent, life-threatening chocolate cravings that their very existence depended on. And in such a situation, if you were vegetarian, or perhaps out of eggs, you wouldn’t want to be left stranded would you? I mean, we’re talking chocolate here. There IS no compromise.

So anyways, I came across this eggless chocolate cake recipe on some online forum… can’t really remember where. It bakes to a pretty decent chocolate cake…not incredibly dense but it makes a fantastic cake that you can use as a base to layer on more flavors. I decided to bake an 8″ cake, halve it and sandwhich the halves with sliced bananas sprinkled with a little lemon juice (so the fruit doesn’t brown). And then frosted the entire thing with a chocolate caramel frosting. The banana-chocolate combination was mind-blowing. Really knocked my hypothetical socks off. And although the frosting was a little too sweet, it was an amazing cake.

Eggless Chocolate Cake

 125g (4 ounces) butter, softened
1 cup castor sugar 
1 teaspoon (5ml) vanilla essence
1/2 cup cocoa
1/2 cup hot water
2 teaspoons (10ml) fresh lemon juice
1 cup milk, at room temperature
1 3/4 cups plain flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda 

1. Cream butter, sugar and vanilla until light and fluffy. Blend the cocoa in the hot water and gradually add to the butter/sugar mixture.
2. Add the lemon juice to the milk to sour it. Let stand for about 10 minutes.
3. Sift the flour, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda and add it to the creamed mixture alternately with the soured milk. Mix thoroughly.
4. Spoon the cake mixture into greased and lined 8″ cake pan and bake in a moderate oven (180 deg. C) for 40-50 minutes or until the top springs back when lightly pressed.
5. Allow the cake to cool in the tin for 10 minutes. Turn out and allow to cool before icing. Again, I did not REALLY care for the chocolate caramel frosting I made. I got the recipe off AllRecipes and it was a little too sweet and not as chocolatey rich as I would have liked it to be. Still looking around for THE ultimate chocolate frosting recipe….

Strewn with sliced bananas. I knew chocolate and raspberries were a good couple, even chocolate and orange. But the taste of this choc-banana combination caught even me by surprise. Maybe it just chocolate. It makes everybody look good.  

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