cooking up a storm in a teacup: Food sacrilege or Black Banana Cake another frugal food recipe

Everyone that I talk to recently about food, complains how expensive it is and that their shopping bill costs much more each month. But it does amaze me that the same friends if I help put away their food shop, I notice are restocking their fridge with exactly the same items that they are throwing away because they are either out of date, or have gone bad...Sacrilege!

I try to politely suggest that if they are putting a kilogram of lovely fresh red beef tomatoes into the fridge whilst simultaneously removing a kilo of the same item that's now covered with a gentle white beard of mould, that maybe they are buying too much. Perhaps half a kilogram would suffice? They will agree with me and then the following week do exactly the same. It's such a shame to waste food when there are lots of little kiddies starving! Not to mention how hard everyone works to earn a living...why throw it all away... apparently tons of food gets thrown away each year in the UK. It just seems so silly.

Anyway I had better get down off my soap box and tell you about the banana cake I baked because it is made from food that you may think is only fit for the compost heap, but believe me isn't. It all began with a magazine article listing 39 food related economies. The first being to make a list before you go shopping, the second was to check your freezer and see if there is anything you could use up before going out to buy more.

I have kind-of been doing this recently because like the oven, our fridge is dying a slow death...it's old heart keeps ticking away but little handles keep snapping off and plastic draws crack and have to be recycled. And it's supposed to be frost free but it keeps freezing up, and then it has a blip and water runs out of the bottom. So I'm slowly emptying it. But the bananas that nobody eats and have turned black...and get put in the freezer drawer until I've saved up enough to make a black banana cake, seemed to have been there for quite a while!

When you defrost them they go all soggy and not very nice...but you just peel and mash them up and they make a great cake ingredient. I've tried a couple of recipes before including Nigel Slater's black banana cake but have recently had emphasised to me, just how bad sugar is for us and so have been searching for low sugar recipes. I found this one that only contains 4 tablespoons of Muscovado sugar...I omitted the icing and just dusted the top with a little icing sugar.

It's very simple to make, basically combining wet with dry ingredients. I used olive instead of sunflower oil which worked fine and my bunt pan...just because it's new and I like using it! It was sweet enough because the ripe bananas contain a lot of sugar as do the added vine fruits. Even though I used organic flour and muscovado sugar this cake cost me a few pounds to make about the same price that a slice of cake would cost in a coffee bar.

proof of the pudding...