Fruitful Baking - The Weekly Bake Off & Valentines Bakes

Previously Posted 05/02/2012 on Breadsticklers.

I hate wasting food, but I also like my fruit to be just ripe not overly ripe. I like bananas but they don't seem to last very long before they start to go brown and spotty. To accompany this weeks Weekly Bake off entry I thought I'd follow the theme of fruit in cake and make chocolate and banana heart shaped cakes... Valentines day is not far away after all.

Firstly though... here is my entry in this weeks bake off.

Farmhouse Orange Victoria Sandwich.

I think I should have let my cake cool a little longer, or perhaps put the cream on the bottom layer then put it in the fridge to let it harden before I put the top layer on? It seemed a bit sloppy but still tasted awesome. There isn't a massive amount of cream but you really don't need a thick layer of it (in my opinion) as the cream was really rich. I deviated from the recipe a little bit by spreading a layer of the fine cut marmalade on the base before adding any cream.

The cake has gone down very well in my house, I only made it a few hours ago and there is less than half of it left!

Here's some more pictures of my cake. I will definitely make this cake in future as it is truly delicious.

Pre-cut..

If your interested in trying out the weekly bake off see the website here. Mary Berry's 100 Cake and Bakes where this recipe was taken from is available from Amazon for a bargain price of £4.


To use up my over ripe bananas I used a Nigella recipe for banana and chocolate muffins, from her book Kitchen. The recipe is also online here . The recipe says to add 125ml of vegetable oil to the mixture but instead I substituted this for 125g of butter. Rather than make them in to muffins I put the mixture in to a large baking tray and then cut heart shapes out of the sponge.

Here's how the turned out! I haven't yet worked out what to do with the cut offs so any suggestions are welcome!



To get the pink dusting I mixed some pink rainbow dust with some icing sugar and then dusted it on the top.

These lovely little hearts are a great valentines gift, giving something home made is always a little bit more special in my eyes. They are so easy to make and are only 15 minutes in the oven.