Simple and good: banana cake

It's not always sewing round here.

Sometimes, there's baking. A good, simple banana cake, for example: ideal for feeding to (or indeed making with) children, and perfect alongside a cup of coffee, too.

This particular cake has no added frills. No chocolate chips, no nuts, no vanilla or cinnamon. it's just soft and gentle and full of banana. I don't know where the recipe originally came from; my much-loved, much-splashed, handwritten version was copied from my mum.

Banana cake

Pre-heat your oven to 150° C, and get out your Magimix.

Ingredients:

• 115 g butter or margarine, softened
• 140 g sugar
• 1 egg
• 3 - 4 ripe bananas (about 300 g or slightly more), mashed
• 200 g self-raising flour
• half teaspoon baking soda
• 1 tablespoon milk

Now, bananas. Of course, the beginning of many banana cakes is the need to use up overripe specimens that would otherwise go to waste. But in my house, the wasting away of bananas rarely coincides with the time and inclination to make cake. And we would waste many: my picky kids refuse to eat a banana, once a black spot has appeared. So what do we do? We freeze them.

They go entirely black, and they look fairly revolting once defrosted. But, what you scoop out of the skins is ideal for immediate baking, no mashing required.

With your bananas appropriately prepared, now mix your batter:

• Cream together the butter/margarine and sugar
• Add the egg
• Add the (mashed) bananas
• Add the flour, baking soda and milk

Line a loaf tin, pour in and level the batter, then cook for 1 hour and 15 minutes.

Remove from the oven and cool in the tin. Cut, and eat.

 Sometimes, the good things really are that simple.