Vietnamese banana fritters

We’ve recently returned from an amazing holiday in Thailand, Laos and Vietnam.  We ate the most incredible food, did a cookery class in the middle of the jungle beside the Mekong river, and spent a day touring the street food secrets of Hanoi.  Last night, back at home, we cooked some of our favourite recipes from the trip for a meal with our friends.  For dessert, I made these Vietnamese street food favourites, banana fritters.  They are dangerously easy!

Vegan banana mini muffins

Lovely mouthful-sized muffins!

Banana, date and rum loaf cake - wheat-free, sugar-free and fat-free!

Our new year's resolution is to try to get healthy. We've started going to the gym (I know, I can hardly believe it myself) and watching the calorie counter on the cycling machines tell you that you've sweated for 10 minutes and only burned about five crisps is slightly soul-destroying, not least as it's made me feel guilty about eating cake.  One of the greatest pleasures in life!  So I have to find a way to make guilt-free cakes. This is my first attempt - it is a fat-free, sugar-free and wheat-free cake - and amazingly, it still tastes delicious!  Made with puréed dates, dried apricots and mashed banana, it's lovely and sweet without the need to add any extra sugar.  Instead of flour it uses a bit of cornmeal (or you could try polenta) to bind it together, and is full of pecans, dried cranberries and sultanas, and finished off with a good glug of dark rum (we all need a little naughtiness...).  As good as any fruit cake, and no guilt attached!

Banana, blueberry and cranberry muffins

A lovely recipe to use up blackening bananas, these combine the background taste of banana bread with classic blueberry muffins, and some fresh cranberries for little explosions of tartness.  

Pomegranate, macadamia and banana bread

Macadamias are just about my favourite kind of nuts - as creamy as white chocolate yet deliciously nutty. A perfect accompaniment to banana bread to use up the black bananas, ripe-as-you-like in our fruit bowl, which were sitting alongside two pomegranates that were beginning to look tired and a little wrinkly. I felt like they were calling out to me to bake them into something wonderful - and this was the result!

Roasted banana ice cream

This is a three ingredient recipe - just coconut milk, honey and bananas, roasted in their skins to bring out their flavour.  It also means it's suitable for vegans as it contains no eggs or milk.  I made it to accompany my roasted banana bread with brown butter frosting and caramelised pistachios.   

Roasted banana bread with brown butter frosting and caramelised pistachios

The smell of roasting bananas is almost as good as great banana bread itself - rich and sweet and caramel - and adds a depth of flavour to my favourite banana bread recipe. I also added a frosting, made with browned butter which also has a similarly caramelised, nutty flavour. I topped it with some caramelised pistachios and took it for dinner with our friends Emma and Geraint, along with some homemade ice cream made with the remaining roasted bananas, coconut milk and honey.  

Banana courgette blondies

I was so impressed with the chocolate courgette brownies I'd made, I decided to try making 'blondies' - brownies without chocolate, this time with banana instead. Again, you'd have no idea that these contained any courgette, and because they are free from eggs or butter they are suitable for vegans. You could almost say these are healthy cakes!

OBAMA rocks! cakes

What an amazing US election result last night! To celebrate Obama's second term in office, I decided to make something with ingredients that spelled out OBAMA (a habit I've got into what with my ABC cake (Apple, Blueberry and Cinnamon), BMW bread (Banana, Mango and Walnut), and more recent BANG cake (Banana, Amaretto, Nut and Ginger)...). These started life as cookies but I soon realised that they tasted just like the rock cakes my mum used to make with us on Sunday afternoons as kids. So rather than flattening small scoops of the dough into cookie shapes, I instead dolloped big scoops onto the baking tray and left them to come out as rock cakes. I made one dough but split it into two batches before adding the different OBAMA fruit and nuts. The first batch contained Oats, Blueberries, Apple, Macadamia and Almonds. The second batch contained Oats, Banana, Apricot, Mango and Almonds. The result: OBAMA rocks! [cakes]

BANG cake (banana, amaretto, nut and ginger)

It's fast approaching that lovely time of year when pumpkins and sparklers come out. In honour of this, I've called this a 'BANG' cake, as it's made from banana, amaretto, nuts and ginger. The cake contains ground walnuts and ground ginger, and is topped with a kind of crumble made from blitzed pecans and crystallised ginger. I'm serving this tonight for my friend Ali who is cooking me supper!

Banana, honey, yoghurt and hazelnut bread

As usual when I make banana bread, it's to use up very ripe bananas which I've secretly been not eating for days so I've got just this excuse! Today I've added toasted hazelnuts, natural yoghurt and a mixture of honey and brown sugar, but for a plain banana bread recipe my old faithful one is here.

Banana doughnut mini-muffins

I don't know what it is, but I often seem to have over-ripe bananas hanging round in my kitchen.  I obviously don't eat them enough when they're fresh - but I think that secretly it's because I'm hoping that if I don't, they'll get so ripe that the only thing good for them is to turn them into a cake.  In fact, it's a similar story with most of the fresh fruit I buy!  Anyway, these are mini banana muffins, but once baked they're rolled in melted butter and cinnamon sugar turning them into mini doughnuts. Don't over sugar them at this stage, but just enough to get that delicious hot fresh doughnut effect.

Banana, yoghurt, honey, oats and walnut muffins

It's my Saturday morning baking session and so I've used up a couple of ripe bananas to make some breakfast muffins.  These fill the house with an amazing smell while they're cooking, and taste delicious!

BMW (Banana Mango Walnut) Bread

Normally if I make a vegan recipe it's a deliberate attempt to provide cake to vegan friends. This one was a happy coincidence that looking for a recipe to use up some very ripe bananas and mangoes I came across a recipe from Joy the Baker which was dairy-free - and turned out to be so good I'll definitely be using it again regardless of who I'm baking for! Normally I'd also take a photo of a whole cake - but this was so delicious I didn't have a chance to get my camera out before half of it had been scoffed! 

Best banana bread

Banana bread is the first thing I remember baking all by myself as a kid.  I had a brilliant recipe in a children's cookery book from the 70s full of lovely illustrations.  Sadly the book has got lost in the mists of time but this recipe is the closest I've come to recreating the banana bread of my childhood which I remember being so proud of - and so excited to eat!