This is a recipe which I wrote back in 2016 when the blog was young. I made these delicious cakes again today for the first time in yonks and decided that the recipe needed updating; I used less sugar, a bit less banana and I made fewer of them so that the cakes were a little bigger. I also took a new photo because my food photography skills have improved in the last four years!

These little cakes are yummy and a good use of squidgy bananas. The recipe is based on Nigel Slaters recipe for a banana loaf with dark chocolate and dark muscavado sugar, but doctored to make nice light little ‘fairy cakes’.

Please have a go at making them and let me know how you get on!

Makes 18 little cakes.

Ingredients.
65 g butter (room temperature)
65 g vegetable oil
180 g soft dark brown sugar
250g ripe bananas (approximately 2)
2 eggs, beaten
250 g plain flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
75 g dark chocolate, chopped

Method
Preheat the oven to 180^oC. Put paper cases into a patty tin.

Cream the butter, olive oil and sugar. Mash the bananas and then beat them into the fat and sugar, followed by the eggs a little at a time. You may need to add a spoonful of the flour with eggs to stop the mixture from curdling.

Sift the flour and baking powder onto the above mixture and fold in.

Chop the chocolate and fold in. You could use chocolate chips rather than chopping the chocolate, but I like the way that you get little crumbs of chocolate when you chop it which melt beautifully into the cake.

Divide the mixture between 18 cake cases and bake in the centre of the oven for approximately 15 minutes.