Lola’s Kitchen: Chocolate Banana Cake with Nuts Recipe

Lola’s Kitchen is a feature on Lola’s Reviews where I talk about all things related to food, cooking and baking. These posts can be recipe posts, tens list posts about food or recipes or more discussion type posts about food. I love cooking and spend some time in the kitchen almost every day, so I wanted to give it a place on my blog as well. The banner for this feature is designed by Michelle from Limabean Designs.

This cake is a combination of two recipe. A Banana bread with coconut recipe and a chocolate banana cake recipe, plus some additional stuff that I thought would be a good idea. This cake is like the perfect combination of chocolate, banana and nuts. It has all three of those flavors and I think they combine really well and none of the flavors is too overwhelming. It’s really good. It has this chocolatey banana flavor with pieces of chocolate in it and it pieces of pecans and it’s made even more nutty due to the finely blended walnuts in the dough. My description doesn’t do just one justice, I hope you give it a try for yourself.

This recipe is loosely based on Jumbo’s Sticky ontbijt-bananancake recipe and Cotton and Crema’s Chocolade Bananenbrood met dadels en notes recipe. Both are dutch recipes.

Ingredients

• Banana’s – 3
• Walnuts – 1 cup/ 110 gram
• Pecan Nuts – 1 cup/ 115 gram
• Chocolate chips – a bit less than 1/2 cup/ 100 gram
• Flour – 2 cups/ 240 gram
• Olive Oil – 1/2 cup/ 125 ml
• Eggs – 3
• Cacao Powder – 2 tablespoons
• Sugar – 3/4 cup/ 150 gram
• Baking powder – 1 teaspoon
• Salt – a pinch

Method

1. First preheat the oven to 356 degrees Fahrenheit/ 180 degrees Celsius. Cover a bread pan with baking proof paper.
2. Then in a blender or kitchen machine blend the walnuts until they have a crumble almost flour like consistency.
3. Chop or break the pecans into smaller pieces. And if not using chocolate chips chop your chocolate in smaller pieces as well and set aside.
4. Combine the flour, cacao powder, sugar, salt, baking powder and blended walnuts in a large mixing bowl and combine using the mixer.
5. Now add the olive oil and the eggs and blend till well combined.
6. Mash the banana’s to a pulp using a fork and add those to the mixture. Again mix till combined.
7. Then add the pecan nuts and chocolate chips and mix till combined.
8. Pour the mixture into the bread pan or over proof baking dish. Then put in the oven for about 52 minutes. After that check with a cake tester if dry, if not let bake for another few minutes
9. Once done take the cake from the oven and let cool for at least 5 minutes before removing from the bread pan and moving to a wire rack to cool down further. At this point you can also slice some of it in pieces to eat.

Tell me about a strange flavor combination that tastes good that you like?