Trisha and I had a group of my old labmates over this afternoon for Sunday lunch and board games. As I was being particularly lazy and buying lunch (Waitrose certainly turned up the goods!), I was especially keen to bake dessert so that the meal wasn't entirely shop bought. A little browsing through cook books and websites turned up the inspiration I needed - rum and raisin banana bread! So, without further ado, here's the recipe, which is based on
this one that I found online.
Rum and Raisin Banana Bread
Ingredients
- 150g Raisins
- ~150-200ml Rum
- 200g Caster sugar
- 175g Butter
- 3 Eggs
- 1tsp Vanilla extract
- 4 Small bananas
- 250g Plain flour
- 1tsp Bicarbonate of soda
- 1tsp Cream of tartar
- 4tbsp/60ml Milk
- 100g Chopped walnuts
Method
- Put the raisins in a bowl and cover with rum and leave for ~1hr to allow the raisins to plump up.
- Cream the caster sugar with the butter.
- Beat in the eggs and vanilla extract.
- Mash the bananas.
- Add the flour, bicarbonate of soda, cream of tartar and mashed bananas into the mixture a little at a time, beating to incorporate.
- Mix in the milk.
- Stir in the raisins and walnuts and a little of the rum. Set the rest of the rum aside.
- Pour into two greased 1lb loaf tins and bake at 170C for ~50 minutes.
- Turn out onto a wire rack. Poke holes through the top with a skewer and spoon the remaining rum on top of the cakes to be absorbed.
Here's the finished article!
I'm really pleased with this one! It was lovely and moist, wonderfully flavourful and rather alcoholic - but the alcohol really wasn't just a novelty, it definitely added to the flavour and helped balance the cake out. I'd suggest that this is one to do with reasonably decent rum though - I think it'd be much less nice if you baked it with Bacardi, for instance. But it went down very well and several people even had seconds! This was definitely a good cake!
