I had some time away from the mixer last weekend as I had lots of work to do, I’m starting to find baking a great way to procrastinate from photo editing. That being said, it was great to get back to my baking ways yesterday to make this beauty.

This is another recipe from Nick Malgieri’s book, ‘Bake!’.

Ingredients

Coconut crumb topping
160g plain flour
70g sugar
1/4 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp ground cinnamon
1/8 tsp salt
about 60g desiccated coconut
110g unsalted butter

rest of the cake
160g plain flour
170g light muscavado sugar
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
110g unsalted butter
2 medium eggs
1 egg yolk
1 tsp vanilla extract
600g bananas

Method

Place the rack in the middle of the oven and pre-heat to 180C. If you start baking when you are hungry, you might be tempted to stick a pizza in at the same time. Don’t do it. You’ll only forget about it, which will likely lead to it burning, and trying to eat a pizza whilst mixing up a cake, and photographing it, is a difficult thing to do well.

For the batter, combine the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt in the bowl of an electric mixer someone kindly gave you for Christmas (thanks Ma), and mix on the lowest speed for 30 seconds with the paddle attachment.

Stop the mixer, add the butter and continue mixing until no visible pieces of butter remain.

In a separate bowl, whisk the eggs, yolk and vanilla together.

Start the mixer again and add 1/3 of the egg mixture to the bowl. Beat for 1 minute on a medium speed; stop and scrape the bowl and beater. Repeat two times, then beat the batter continuously for 2 minutes on a medium speed.

Scrape the batter into the prepared tin and smooth the top.

Next, peel a bunch of bananas and slice them up to roughly 1cm thick.

Arrange the banana slices on top of the batter, leaving a 5mm margin near the side of the tin.

For the crumb topping, stir together the flour, sugar, baking powder, cinnamon and salt. Stir in the coconut and then mix with the butter. Leave the mix to stand for a few minutes and then use your fingers to break it in to crumbs.

Once crumbed, sprinkle evenly over the bananas.

Bake until well risen and deeply golden, probably for about 50-60 minutes.

Let the cake cool on a rack after dropping the sides off your tin and once completely cool, use a palette knife to separate it from the baking parchment.

It didn’t rise as much as I was expecting, but overall a fairly tasty cake, although it does make a right bloody mess.

6/10

• Cake