Obsession

This was a post pancake day bake but it turned out WONDERFUL. Basically I have a friend who has a major love of banoffee. So when I had a pancake day gathering we grabbed bananas, toffee and cream. Lots of cream. But come the week after, I'm sitting around with some leftover bananas ripening nicely and half a can of caramel. So I went searching online :) Now this recipe came from the NY Times which I linked here. I made some adjustments to use up the leftover ingredients I had, in particular cutting the sugar content and...well I didn't have enough butter so I did use spread to make up the difference in the crust and the blondie batter and I don't think it suffered significantly even if it was super light Flora (not recommended for baking!) Anyway, I list my adjusted recipe below: 280g unsalted butter 200g Oreos (56p on deal, but any biscuit would be pretty good) 2 bananas 2 large eggs 350g dark brown sugar 1 tsp vanilla (I'd try the rum but we have no...

I've made chocolate cage cakes before, but never brilliantly. In fairness, this isn't brilliant but it did get a lot of attention. The whole process is very, very simple and is very handy for covering up the less than brilliant buttercream smoothing I do on the sides. Did I mention I hate buttercream? Gets sugar everywhere, dries hard and is far, far too sweet. I did  try a cooked flour frosting the week before but my friend complained it wasn't sweet enough. Anyway, let's talk chocolate cage. You have a cake which you've covered with some kind of frosting. Assuming your oven doesn't suck as badly as my current one which messed up even the simple victoria sponge inside this cake, you'll have a cake. By itself, that's fine. To the cage - measure around the cake - and do it AFTER you've frosted it. I did this based on the cake pan and ended up about an inch short. (FYI not an issue, just squiggle some chocolate on a spare bit and patch...