[Food] Banana Cakes with Maple Pecan Icing

I love banana bread and when I saw this recipe for little banana cakes I had to make them!

Ingredients:

100g/4oz butter, softened plus extra for greasing

170g/6oz of caster sugar

2tbsp maple syrup

2 large eggs

2 ripe bananas, mashed

2tsp baking powder

For the icing:

100g icing sugar

2-3 tbsp maple syrup

a few drops of vanilla extract

36 pecan nut halves, toasted

1. Heat the oven to 190C/170C fan/gas 5 and grease a 12 hole muffin tin.

2. If you have a electric whisk or processor you can put all the ingredients for the cake into that and whizz it up until it's all combined. I did mine by hand and I creamed together the butter and sugar. Added the eggs, flour and baking powder. Add the mashed banana and maple syrup and mix it all together.

3. Spoon the mixture into the muffin tin and bake for 15 minutes until the cakes are firm and a cocktail stick inserted into the centre of a cake comes out clean. Cool in the tin for 5 minutes and then transfer to a cooling rack.

4. To ice the cakes, sift the icing sugar into a bowl, then stir in the maple syrup and vanilla to make a thick drizzle icing (I had to add a bit more maple syrup to make mine runny enough, but it still turned out great!).

5. Turn the cakes upside down, you may have to cut the bottoms to make the cake stand up flat, I had to with mine. Drizzle the icing over the top and place 3 of the toasted pecans on each cake. Then drizzle some icing on top of those too.

My mum wasn't that keen on the icing so I only put a blob on hers to stick the pecans down and dusted the top with icing sugar. I still think it looks really effective.

It's such an easy recipe and they taste great too. My family and I had ours with custard on the top!

Enjoy!

♥