Banana, honey and macadamia cake

It's the start of 2 weeks off work which makes it a good cake baking opportunity. I've got a couple of other ideas in mind for the rest of my hols. However, as usual, I had some very ripe bananas in the fruit bowl so, first up, is a recipe I've been meaning to try for a while.

Banana, honey and macadamia cake is from the Cupcakes book which I've mentioned before. It's an easy recipe as there's no creaming of sugar and butter or folding in.

The recipe also fulfilled a holiday goal of clearing my cupboards of odds and ends of ingredients. I had one jar and two (no longer) squeezy bottles of honey, all with less than  an inch left. In the end, I used all of these plus another full bottle. I was surprised at the amount required. The butter and honey were melted together and left to cool.

The rest of the ingredients were put into a large bowl. The carrots are from my garden and were disappointingly small. I've never had such a poor harvest: it must be the awful summer we've had as I've used the same seed before and produced lovely, long, sturdy carrots.

The macadamia nuts were chopped in a food processor as it gives a more consistent texture. It's also a lot quicker than chopping by hand and I'm all for making life easier.

The honey/butter was added and all the ingredients mixed together in one go. I've found that using a fork to stir the wet and dry ingredients helps keep the batter light. I use a sort of gentle whipping action rather than the folding technique usually recommended. It probably goes against all the baking rules but works for me.

The tin liner is from Lakeland though I've noticed most of the supermarkets sell them now. A wonderful invention as lining tins is my least favourite part of baking.

The recipe produced a very wet batter which usually means a longer baking time. I had to guess at the timing as the original recipe was for cupcakes rather than a loaf. In the end it took over 2 hours.

OK, so you're probably wondering what the final product looked like. Well, here it is...

Yes, you'd be right in thinking this looks rather moist. In fact, no amount of time in the oven was ever going to dry this one out. I'm still puzzling over what went wrong. Clearly too few dry ingredients, or too much liquid, or maybe making it as a loaf rather than as cupcakes? My gut feeling is too much honey but I know I used the amount stated in the recipe as it specified one cup and I used my American jug to work out the amount.

I'm soooooo disappointed. I can't remember the last time I had such a baking disaster. I did debate whether to blog about it but, if this is to be a reflection of my life, it should show the good, the bad and the ugly. And this definitely falls under the last two.

'C'est la vie' as Chickpea always says (along with 'que sera, que sera'!). And as we're still one cake short of having a cake, I'd better get on and make another. Wish me luck!