Brulée Banana Walnut Dark Chocolate Chip Loaf Cake

For the past 2 days my youngest have been at home with me. We went out to visit a museum yesterday. Today, we made banana loaf cake, and hidden within were morsels of dark chocolate chips and walnuts. 

For any recipes that call for banana to be mixed into the batter, use really ripe bananas to get good banana flavour. When I say ripe, I meant really ripe where the whole banana turned brown. It will be in a state that you will never want to eat it as it is, but it is in its best state for baking. But if you do not have bananas in this that ripe, eating bananas will work too.

I put a spin on the regular banana walnut cake by topping the cake with some sliced banana before baking and bruleeing (caramelized sugar) them after they are out of the oven. This gave the cake a sweet, crunchy topping, creating an interesting texture.

Brulee Banana Walnut Chocolate Chip Loaf Cake  

(makes two 20cm by 10cm by 7cm loaf cakes, adapted from Martha Stewart – The perfect pound cake)

Ingredients:

250g unsalted butter, softened 

313g organic unbleached all-purpose flour, sifted

218g granulated sugar 

4 1/2 large eggs
50g walnut, toasted 
50g dark (70% cocoa) chocolate chip

2 tsp pure vanilla extract 

1/2 tsp salt
4 bananas, mash up 3 really ripe bananas but set aside 1 just ripened banana to top the cake  


Steps to bake:

• Preheat oven to 160 degrees Celsius and grease and line with baking paper, two 20cm by 10 cm by 7 cm loaf pan.

• Using a mixer, fitted with a ‘k’ beater, beat the butter, sugar and salt until light and fluffy.

• Add eggs, one at a time, beating between each addition.
• Add in the mashed banana and mix until fully incorporated.

• Stir in vanilla and then fold in the flour.

• Pour the batter into the prepared pan. With the remaining 1 banana, sliced into 0.5cm thick and place on top of the batter.
• Bake for 65 minutes or until a toothpick inserted comes out clean.

• Allow the loaves to cool in the pan for at least ten minutes before removing onto a cooking rack. (As I was using the disposable paper pan, I cooled the cake in the pan on a wire rack)

• Once the cake is cooled, sprinkle some fine sugar on top of the banana slices and using a blow torch, carefully  caramelize the sugar. This process is known as brulee. This last step is optional though. As I find that the baked banana slices looked a little dried out and dull in color, that is why I did the brulee'ing.

Some pictures that I took at the Singapore's ArtScience museum.

Reflection of the ArtScience Museum on a concave mirror.

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