Impressed with the therapeutic effects of my Wednesday night bake-athon, I lined myself up for another the following night…

I’m much more a savoury (un- some may say…) character than a sweet…so I don’t cook a great amount of sweet items, even less so now that I am withdrawing from the attractions of sugar and processed foods…however, in the interests of science, and interested to see how some of my hoovered recipes might turn out…I dallied with the sweet side of the Force…

…and that’s where this image came from…googling for a header image took me to I Quit Sugar and then to some very (chocolatey) dark recipes…watch this space…

So anyways…baking cakes…I had two targets in sight…one driven by a preponderance of feijoas in the fridge (’tis the season) and the other by a ‘waste not’ recipe for banana peels that flicked across my radar on Facebook…

I found a good mix of feijoa recipes at the Waikato Times and intended (and still do) to make something from here but the absence of sour cream in the pantry for the chocolate feijoa cake nudged me towards this one from Melanie Khan. It’s pretty simple  and i made it as writ, less using three-quarters of a cup of raw sugar instead of the directed full cup of white processed sugar (white is bad).

It was quite solid when it came out of the oven: cooked but it didn’t rise as well as I think it was meant to…I’m attributing this to the moist mass of feijoa being disproportionate to the quantity of flour…it had a good strong feijoa flavour so next time – if there is one: so many feijoa recipes and only so much time – I might reduce the amount of fruit and/or reduce it before adding it to the mix so that it is least moist…

Banana peel cake on the left, spicy feijoa on the right

The main appeal of the banana peel cake was its ‘no waste’ theme – we go through a lot of bananas here on the Green Journey and the peels go directly into the compost to nourish future generations of food – and as we make more and more of our own food, an additional benefit is the reduction in waste, especially packaging for things like pre-packaged products like not-milk milks…so in for a penny…

Although punted around on Facebook, the actual recipe lives at Love Food Hate Waste which has some other interesting recipes for food items that may be approaching their final best by date…as we hit the Central Plateau carrot season (through til October), one that has a real appeal up here is the carrot cake cookies.

The ‘Kune Carrot Shop

Fair warning though, even though it is great that people are publishing  recipes that promote using and not dumping food, these recipes are on the Dark side of healthy with a very high sugar component. I’d be looking at reducing some of that using maybe a couple of bananas perhaps..?

You do have to peel bananas for the banana peel cake…and, if necessary, can save peels in the freezer until you have enough…making sure that you allow time for them to thaw before blending them. I forgot and waiting to the peels to go from rigid to gooey is the main reason the spicy feijoa cake hit the oven first – normally I would do the more complex recipe first: just in case it all goes horribly wrong, at least, I already have something cooking…

Again, I made the recipe as writ with no major issues once I was able to get the skins mushed in the blender…one tip for young players would be to not tutu with the tensioning clip on the cake tin once the cake mix is in: very messy trying to refit the base and close the tension clip again…

The cake rose nicely but I probably left it in a little long as it was a tad dry inside…tasted OK but you’d expect with the amount of sugar in it. I don’t think that the banana peels added anything that could not have been achieved using the normal part of the banana, or even a handful of caraway seeds or something similar…

The creamy substance around the edges is my attempt at a lemon icing and possibly evidence that you can’t believe everything that you read online. My second choice for a feijoa cake recipe was this Lemon Iced Feijoa Cake from the Chelsea site (which sole purpose is the promotion of sugar!) but I had no milk, forgetting that I now have a large bag of coconut milk powder for just this contingency, nudging me towards Door #3…

I did, however, like the sound of the lemon icing as a finishing touch for the banana peel cake, and made this as writ but there is simply too much fluid for the dry content and even after three days, the icing still hadn’t set and most of it drizzled off the sides and soaked into the base – which was not unpleasant…

This  versus  

Comparing the Chelsea recipe on the left with this lemon icing one from All Recipes, you can see that  it has only a quarter the dry content of the other one…an interesting experiment and one that I will file away from when I need a super-sweet lemon effect to soak into a target dessert…

Just for the record though, if I had made the banana peel cake as writ plus the lemon icing recipe on the right, the total sugar content would be 5 1/2 cups of sugar…HOLY MALLOLY!!!! My butterscotch pudding only has a half cup (reduced from a full cup in the original recipe) plus two tablespoons of syrup for the sauce and I thought that was sweet..!!

Not being overly-sweet oriented, I kept the lemonised half of the banana peel cake (all gone now! #sugarcraving ) and gave the other half and the feijoa cake, less a couple of taste-testing slices, to my flue-ey friend to maintain energy levels until a full recovery is in effect…