This cake uses probably the best cake tin I have ever experienced. I only made this cake because of this tin. I didn't care for the cake itself, I just wanted to try this baby out.

Linda at work scored the bargain of the year at the recycling shop. It was this old, massive heart shaped cake tin and she got it for a song! (ie $1!!!) Yes one dollar. I am so jealous. It is the sturdiest tin I have ever seen and looks like it has been through a war or two. It would make an excellent fruit cake. So generously she offered to let me borrow it so the next day at work I walked home with this beautiful baby in my arms (quite literally my arms were wrapped around it in a caring an loving manner).

Re-wind back to last Sunday.

My love of baking was gone. I feared I would never bake a cake again. At least never for another boy again! My secret ingredient in all my baking is love and all that was left of my love supply was a few measly stale crumbs at the bottom of the barrel (yes I usually have quite a lot of love hence the massive but empty barrel). I think what I was most annoyed about was the amount of butter I wasted on him. So annoyed! Do you know how much that stuff is going for these days?

On Wednesday I met up with my friend Evan for coffee and he reassured me that not all boys are as dumb as what I had been believing at the time. Anyway, long story short my frown had been turned upside down and I bounced back to the lab and proceeded to have an excellent day (despite being up to my elbows in a very foul smelling milk experiment).

To say thank you for this restoration of faith and to celebrate my renewed stash of baking-grade love I decided to bake a cake.

Well it turned out to be nine cakes.

Nine small cakes.

We had debated the merits of the old feijoa (for those who don't know what a feej is, google it). I am not a fan of the feej but Mr Evan is. A compromise was made when it was decided that the best way to eat a feej is in a feijoa and banana cake.

So feijoa and banana cake it was going to be.

I wanted to use a Texan muffin pan to make large but still individually portioned cakes. I made a single banana cake recipe and it managed to fill nine patty cases really rather nicely.

They turned out wonderful. But alas I did not take any photos of them.

It was a shame to waste such a good cake recipe and not share it with you guys so out of duty I decided to make another.

Fast forward to Saturday.

I had this tin. It was marvellous. I needed a good reliable cake that was going to stay moist and luscious.

Enter my friend Lars.

It was a Saturday night, neither of us had anything cool to do so I was like, hey, come over and lets bake a cake then you can take it back to your flat. Win win. I get to blog about a cake and not have to eat it all myself and his flat gets a cake. It was a perfect arrangement. And I have to say he is the best banana and feijoa masher I have ever seen.

This is Lars. Does he not have the most excellent mop of hair ever?

He thought he was fast enough to avoid being snapped. Guts for him.

#Larshasluscioushair

I had to make a double recipe, just so that it would fill the tin a few centimetres deep!

Basically all you have to do is add a few extra feijoas to the mix and you are good to go. They were really expensive at the supermarket so we only added six to the entire cake. I would suggest at least five good mushy ones for each cake recipe you make (as in I really should have added around 10 feijoas to mine).

The moment this cake came out of the oven was one of the proudest of my cake making life. The top was so flat, it had pulled ever so slightly away from the edges making removing it a dream!

Then we just simply iced it with a light and fluffy vanilla buttercream icing and we were good to go!

If you are doing a really large cake and you double this recipe, reduce the temperature to 170 degrees and increase the bake time to an hour to seventy minutes testing with a clean knife every ten minutes from the fifty minute mark. Cooking time will depend on depth of cake. If the top gets too brown, cover with tin foil and return to the oven.

Banana and Feijoa Cake

a single recipe for a normal 23cm cake

125g butter, softened

3/4 cup brown sugar

2 eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 1/2 cup plain flour

1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

3 small mushy bananas, mashed

5-6 very ripe feijoas, mashed

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees and line and grease your cake tin.

Cream together the butter and sugar until light and creamy. Add in the eggs one at a time and beat until as fluffy and voluminous as it can get. Add in the vanilla and mix.

Mix in your mashed banana and feijoa.

Sift in the flour, baking powder and baking soda and gently mix until just combined but the batter is smooth and there are no flour lumps.

Pour the mixture into the prepared tin, smooth out and bake for 35 minutes or until a clean knife or skewer comes out clean.

Once the cake has completely cooled, ice with a simple vanilla butter cream.

Cream together 40g softened butter with three cups of icing sugar a teaspoon of vanilla and a wee splash of milk. Beat until fluffy. You can add more milk if its not smooth enough or more icing sugar if you need a bit more icing.

Slap this on the cake and you are now ready to consume! And consume you certainly will as this cake is so moist!