Chocolate and Banana Fudge Cake

This is essentially my Chocolate Fudge Cake with bananas in it. I made it for a friend at work as it's his birthday on Thursday. Normally I'd have brought it into work but we worked out that we won't actually be working at the same time until mid July so I thought it would be better to bring it to the pub for his birthday drinks sesh, which everyone at work went along to. The pub staff were kind enough to bring the cake out for us even though they were busy catering for the England match in another room. I've told you before how little interest I have in sport, but a few of the people I was with wanted to know the score so kept craning their necks to see what was going on on the TV across the bar, and we got the general gist of what was happening from all the cheering. Apparently we won!

You may remember how much I loved the Chocolate Fudge Cake - it was literally heaven on a plate - so I have high hopes for this one. Banana and chocolate is always a winning combination, but this can have disastrous consequences for the waistline if one is not too careful, for example the last time I made the Chocolate & Banana Loaf Cake I ended up eating at least half of it in two days. Not good.

The weather seems to have finally noticed that it's actually supposed to be summer and we've got a small heatwave (only 16-18C, not too exciting) coming up here in Devon over the next few days. I'm always dubious about sitting out in the garden here because as soon as the sun disappears behind a cloud you're plunged into cold. Seeing as there is almost always a cloud hovering threateningly nearby, I just sit in the (considerably warmer) conservatory and pretend I'm in the Mediterranean. As I'm typing, the conservatory is a balmy 30C - much better. At least at 16 degrees we can justify wearing shorts and possibly even not have to wear a jacket or long sleeves. Possibly.

I warn you that this cake is not diet friendly, even if you employ all of the Healthy(ish) Baking tips I've given you. Best to save it for a treat. Or bake it, then take it to work and offer it to the masses so that even if you want to eat more you can't because it's been hoovered up by everyone else.

Ingredients
For the cake:

• 200g Self Raising Flour
• 200g Caster Sugar
• 200g Butter
• 50g Dark Chocolate
• 100mL Sour Cream
• 1 Tsp Baking Powder
• 2 Ripe Bananas
• 2 Eggs

For the icing:

• 150g Dark Chocolate
• 50mL Sour Cream
• 30g Light Muscovado Sugar
• 75g Butter
• 3 Egg Yolks

Recipe:

• Preheat the oven to 200C/180C fan. Line two sandwich tins.
• Put the butter, sour cream and dark chocolate into a saucepan over a low heat and stir occasionally until the chocolate and butter have melted. Stir in the eggs.
• Put the flour, baking powder and sugar in a bowl and make a well. Pour the chocolate mixture into the well you made and stir well, scraping round the bottom to make sure you get all of the flour.
• Thinly slice the (peeled) bananas into the mixture and stir them in.
• Divide the mixture between the sandwich tins and bake for 25 minutes, or until a skewer comes out clean. 
• Meanwhile, make the icing by putting everything but the egg yolks into a saucepan over a low heat and stirring occasionally until the chocolate has melted and there are no lumps in the mixture. 
• Stir in the egg yolks, remove from the heat and leave to cool and thicken.
• When the icing has thickened somewhat, place one cake face down and spread about a third of the icing over the top. Place the second cake on top and cover with the remaining icing. The icing will run down the sides a little bit - I was happy to let it happen but you can tidy it up if you want to.

I'll be making two more cakes this week, so look out for them. I hope the weather is at least vaguely summery wherever you are!