Brown butter banana loaf with cardamom and orange frosting.

If you don’t want to eat it all, slice it up, arrange it on a tray and freeze. Once it’s frozen pop into a zip lock. When you’re ready for a slice, put it under a hot grill to toast each side and then you can top with honey or butter or even the icing. 

Cake or bread? Debatable, questionable. Cake, it’s cake, right?  anyway, I’m calling it a loaf, which is what it is.

make sure you beat your icing sugar frosting mix for as long as you’ve patience for, it’ll be worth it for the super soft and light frosting gift your stand alone will hand you at the end.

Keep any extra frosting close by for extra splodging.

Makes: 1 loaf 

150g butter

3 bananas, mashed 

175g soft light brown sugar 

2 organic eggs 

175g self raising flour 

Pinch sea salt 

100g dark chocolate chips 

For the icing: 

100g butter

200g icing sugar 

Zest and juice of 1 large orange 

1 tbsp cardamom pods

1. Pop your oven on to 160c fan. Grease and line a 2lb loaf tin with parchment paper. 

2. Add the butter to a medium pan over medium heat. Once melted, watch carefully and simmer until it has turned a golden brown. Allow to cool a little and mix with bananas. 

3. Beat the sugar and eggs together until light and fluffy. I do this for about 5 minutes, and I time it so i’m not tempted to stop it before it’s really ready. Mix the butter, banana mix through it and stir through the flour, salt  and chocolate. 

4. Pour into the tin, spread to create and even surface, bake 50 minutes, turn in the oven if yours cooks a little unevenly. At this time, it’ll be cooked through, risen and golden. If you have a cake tester, use it or else use a skewer or something super skinny to double check it comes out clean. Leave to cool completely 

5. For the icing, beat the butter, sugar and orange juice together until super light and fluffy, this will take about 8 minutes. Bash the cardamom pods in a pestle and mortar, remove the skins and then bash the seeds until fine-ish. You don’t want powder. Mix this and the orange zest through the fluffy buttery mix. 

6. Once the banana bread has cooled, top with the icing and serve.

SO a few tips for cake making:

try be bang on with ingredients. if you don’t have an electric weighing scales, get one. It’ll save on washing up too. Pop your bowl onto the scales and weigh into it.

for icing, an offset spatula is your best friend. it means you won’t have splodges of the icing gathering on your sleeve, or up it. BUT most importantly it’ll help to give you those yummy, tasty looking swirls, which are even better filled with caramel pools.

Oven temp, know your oven, I recently moved to a new apartment and while the oven is electric and fan and well, just fine, it does cook a little unevenly and by baking it it I can see the heat gathers at the door and that side of the cake cooks a little faster. so make sure to turn it, when you remember. Sure anyway, a little bit of burn never harmed anyone.

• MOST OF ALL

have fun, enjoy it, if you aren’t, don’t bother, do something else that brings a smile to your face. but, that being said, I think you will with this one, most definitely eating anyway.