Good ways to get rid of black bananas: Chocolate Chip Banana Cake

It’s always the way, isn’t it? You go to the supermarket and get a lovely bunch of yellow bananas. You eat one that day, take some to work for lunch the day after and even slice one on top of your muesli for breakfast. Then you forget about their existence. It’s a fact of life that any fruit sitting around in the fruit bowl for more than three days becomes invisible – until it changes colour. Then the left-over bananas are no longer enticingly yellow but a kind of off-putting mottled browny black. There’s nothing to do but compost them or throw them in the bin. But wait. Maybe there’s another alternative?

There was a time here in New Zealand when I didn’t have many recipe books. I still don’t – but at least I’ve photocopies of the recipes I’m likely to use, courtesy of Christchurch’s amazing library. Back in the dark days I pored over recipes on bags and boxes of ingredients. Sometimes these were rubbish, but not always, and one day I discovered this recipe for Chocolate Chip Banana Cake on the back of my Cadbury’s Bournville Chocolate Chips box. I tasted a similar cake, warm from the oven, years ago at some food festival in Dublin’s RDS. It’s fragrant moist banana-ness, enriched with melting chocolate, was what I wanted to recreate here and it truly was a success. It didn’t last long that first night and I’ve made it several acclaimed times since. The only problem is that I only have the cup measurements – if you have a set, use them. If not, get them. They will come in handy.