Recently I bought a bunch of bananas from the supermarket (some new brand that I hadn’t tried before) and although they had sat on my counter top for days and had turned completely yellow on the outside, the flesh inside was still somewhat dry and firm. If I had a dehydrator, I could probably turn them into banana chips easily. They didn’t taste good on their own as they weren’t sweet enough so I decided to use these bananas for baking instead.
I roasted whole unpeeled bananas in the oven just to ripen them up more before mashing and mixing them up with the cake batter. Also added shredded carrots for extra sweetness.
I wasn’t planning to decorate the cake in any way but in the end I still added round sprinkles (which conveniently filled up the gaps on the surface) as I found some in the fridge that was waiting to be used up. Hubby liked the sprinkles ‘cos they added crunch so it wasn’t a bad move I guess, haha.
The cake was moist, not overly sweet with a lovely aroma of cinnamon. Best paired with a cuppa. 😉
Banana Carrot Cake Recipe
Ingredients (makes one 8″ round cake)
3 ripe whole bananas approx. 420g
1 carrot approx. 160g, shredded
1-2 ripe bananas, peeled & sliced thinly
250g self-raising flour
3 large eggs
140g butter, softened
120g castor sugar
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
sprinkles for decoration (optional)
Instructions
1. Preheat oven to 180 deg C. Grease a 8″ round cake tin and line the bottom with parchment paper.
2. Transfer the whole bananas onto a baking tray and roast in the oven for 20 minutes till the skin turns black.
3. Remove the bananas and leave to cool.
4. Peel the bananas and remove the flesh into a bowl. Mash up the banana flesh with a fork. Set aside.
5. Combine the flour, eggs, butter, sugar and ground cinnamon in a cake mixer and mix at high speed till smooth.
6. Fold in the mashed banana (from Step 4) and grated carrot.
7. Pour the batter into the cake tin, spread out evenly with a spatula and arrange the banana slices on top in one single layer.
8. Bake for 50 minutes until toothpick inserted into the cake comes out clean.
9. Decorate the cake as desired or serve as it is.