moosifer jones's lair & grouch – online home & blog of Mags L Halliday

When shopping on Sunday I foolishly asked Georgina what she wanted on her cake. I’d been planning a Stuffy cake but no. Her response was immediately “Spider-man.” I foolishly agreed and then had several days of being reminded by her about the “Spider-man cake”. So I made a simple vanilla sponge cake, based on a hummingbird cafe cupcake recipe and iced it.

Clearly borrowing How to Draw the Marvel Way from the library as a teenager paid off. Although my lettering sucks.

After having a portion last night, she demanded “tiny bit more” but didn’t get it. The cake recipe has 10oz of sugar in it for making 12-18 cupcakes – no way does she get more than one portion of cake a day. This morning, one of her first requests on waking was for the Spider-man cake.

I am aware you can buy professionally produced cakes in the supermarket but that’s not the point. Until she gets to an age where she is horrified by wonky homemade things, she’s getting a cake made by me. I’m just hoping she asks for something easy to do…

I really needed to use up some bananas tonight but I also really needed to use up an aubergine and some mozzerella. I wanted to make the layered aubergine/mozzerella bake but that would mean I couldn’t make the banana loaf cake due to them both using the same baking tin. After recalling the words of many a cook book, i.e. never tamper with a baking recipe, I decided to see what happened if I made the banana cake in muffin cases.
Result:

Recipe notes:
This follows this recipe for banana cake from the Guardian. I used two very ripe bananas so increased the baking powder to 3 tsp. I also only sieved the flour, baking powder and spices once because I couldn’t be bothered and I used the all-purpose handblender rather than any whisk (attached or otherwise). The key difference, however, is in the actual “getting it into the oven” stage. In my version this reads:
Put the muffin cases into the muffin tray.
Spoon 6 tsp of the mix into each muffin case.
Bake at 200C for approx. 20 minutes.

I’m the first to admit that, technically, these are just more elaborate muffins than my usual rough muffin mix. I’m fairly sure this would also be an excellent light loaf cake as well. Now I need a recipe for Jamacian ginger cake…