The results are in

This is a picture of the cake before I frosted it. For frosting I melted a couple of tablespoons of butter in the microwave, stirred in a spoonful of cocoa powder, a little milk, and a couple of cups of powdered sugar. Even without the frosting, though, the cake wasn't bad. A very strong banana flavor, but the texture is nice. Nuts would have helped. Dad ate two pieces of it, in his typical fashion of in a bowl with milk over it. Ice cream would have been even better. I'll most likely put the rest of it in the freezer for a future dessert when we need something easy to feed a crowd. So you'd better watch out! Next time you come to visit you might get fed chocolate banana cake for dessert!

Chocolate Banana Cake

Crystal from Everyday food storage has been sharing cake recipes this month. She inspired me to try making a cake, but because I have lots of yogurt that needs to be used, and we have some overripe bananas that need to be used, and I'm craving a bit of chocolate, well, I did a search for a recipe for a cocoa banana cake, and then I adapted it, and this is what I came up with:

3/4 cup bean puree (oil or margarine or butter)

1 1/2 cups pureed bananas (I used 3)

1 cup whole wheat flour

3/4 cup all-purpose flour

1 cup sugar

3 tablespoons powdered egg (or 3 eggs)

1/4 cup cocoa

2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

6 tablespoons water (for the three powdered eggs--if you're using regular eggs, omit the water)

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

2/3 cup homemade yogurt (sour cream)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees and grease a 9x13 pan. Combine the bean puree and the banana puree in a mixing bowl, then add the two flours, the sugar, the egg powder, the cocoa, the baking powder, the baking soda, the salt, and the water. Mix until combined. Mix in the vanilla extract and the yogurt. Pour into pan and bake until done--30 minutes?

I took a bottle of pinto beans and drained off some of the juice and then pureed it in the blender. I measured the 3/4 cup and put the rest of the puree in a container in the fridge. Then I blended up the bananas, measured them, and found that 3 bananas made the 1 1/2 cups (the original recipe suggested using 4 to make the 1 1/2 cups--maybe pureeing it incorporated air into it, I don't know!). Put those things into my mixer bowl and went from there. I'll let you know how it goes. The original recipe is here. I won't be following their recipe for the icing, as I don't have cream (unless I use more yogurt) or corn syrup. If I ice it I'll likely just use powdered sugar and cocoa and butter and a little milk. I'm a little nervous about using the beans in place of the oil. They say it can be done, but I'm still not sure. I'm hoping the bananas and yogurt in there will help the texture in case the beans don't. I guess I'll never really know, though, since I won't have a "control" cake to compare it with.

p.s. This is probably my last attempt at using that yogurt that I made. But that's another story...

p.p.s. While I'm waiting for my cake to bake, I just read the rest of the blog post, and it looks like this person did not like this cake recipe! She got it from this New York Times article, and was very disappointed with the texture and with how the bananas overpowered the chocolate. I knew I should have used 1 cup of cocoa instead of 1/4 cup! Oh, and now I see that she links to a banana cake recipe on her own blog that she much prefers, which also calls for sour cream, so I guess I could have used my yogurt in that one, too. Well, we shall see.

Dessert

My picture, here in the shadows, is not very bright. But I wanted to share this recipe for an apple cake that we had for dinner tonight. It was very good. It comes from Dana Thornock's Lean and Free 2,000 Plus book.

Apple Cake

Mix together:

1/2 to 2/3 cup honey or brown sugar (I used honey)

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 cup margarine (I used butter)

1 egg

Add:

1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour

1 teaspoon cinnamon

dash nutmeg

1 teaspoon soda

2 cups chopped apple (about 2 medium apples)

topping to be added before baking:

1/3 cup brown sugar

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1/2 cup chopped nuts, optional (I used almonds because they were already chopped from last night's dinner. Otherwise I would have used walnuts)

Bake 45 minutes at 350 degrees in 6" x 8" pan. (I don't own a 6x8 pan. I used a pie tin. I think I overbaked it, because I had the oven at 375. But it was still good. Warm with a glass of milk. Mm-mm!)

Ellen