And now for something completely different

Lexikaliker’s banana ginger cake looked so tempting, how could I resist?

While I was preparing the dough I realised that some of the ingredients link to the pencil friends I got to know during the last one or two years. The butter was from Denmark (Hej Henrik) and I even used a cake tin that came from the same Danish company. Most of the ingredients were obviously British (Hello Bruce) and the recipe was from Germany (Hallo Gunther). I thought the ginger was bought from a US-American company (Hi Sean), but it turns out this chain isn’t American at all. I do have honey from New Zealand (Kia Ora David) and some very strong Canadian bread flour in the cupboard (Hi Stephen), but both were not needed for this recipe. What a shame I couldn’t include the countries from all my pencil friends.

Not easy to recognise: that's suppossed to be Lexikaliker's logo on the cake

 

Lexikaliker’s recipe has been slightly adjusted to fit the ingredients I could get:

  • 125 g butter
  • 150 g sugar
  • one pack of vanilla sugar (occasionally available from Lidl UK)
  • 2 eggs
  • 50 g starch
  • 200 g self-rising flour
  • 2 bananas
  • 50 g candied ginger

Icing:

  • 150 g icing sugar
  • 2 – 3 tablespoons lemon juice

Our gas oven is very difficult to use, it tends to be either too hot or too cold, but one thing you can be sure of: it delivers inconsistent results. Lexikaliker’s baking time of 45 minutes at 180 °C was nowhere near enough in our oven..

8 thoughts on “And now for something completely different”

  1. The cake was really nice! My wife liked it, too. Maybe a bit sweet, but I blame that on the candied ginger, which was probably sweeter than it should have been. Next time I will know how to change the settings on our gas oven to compensate for its unreliability.

  2. Bake it in the shape of a pencil – that’s a good idea – will you accept the challenge :-)To get us Kiwi’s in maybe next time you can substitute some honey for the sugar! I won’t be so mean as to suggest you give Henrik the elbow and put some good Kiwi butter in 🙂

  3. Hehehe, you are right, but the only NZ honey we have is too good to use it in a cake. My wife bought and when she wanted to try out the “everywhere highly praised” Manuka honey and I think she would get a shock if it disappears in a cake.
    You are right that there is NZ butter on the shelves (and NZ lamb of course), but Henrik’s country has a huge market share here in the UK when it comes to butter and bacon. I should try it once, but usually we go for the “lighter” butter (spread), not margarine yet, but lighter than butter.

  4. It seems manuka honey has spread around the globe on the basis of its genuine medicinal qualities. I am a great fan of honey, but personally I prefer the lighter varieties such as vipers bugloss, tawari, kamahi, rata and of course the “champagne of honey”, pohutukawa although it is very hard to source.

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