Globecooking recipe : Banana & Coconut Cake (Vanuatu)

It's the school holidays, which means I'm having one of my traditional full-on #KitchenClearouts to make space in the cupboards. After making Coconut & Cinnamon Beef Curry in honour of National Curry Week last week (click through for the recipe), I had half a can of coconut milk sitting in the fridge. I went googling for inspiration and found a recipe for Banana & Coconut Pie on the Newstalk ZB website. Not only did this use up some of the other things cluttering up my cupboard - some coconut chips, coconut sugar and the end of a jar of sesame seeds - it also appealed to my globe-cooking passion because it comes from Vanuatu, which is a South Pacific Ocean nation, made up of roughly 80 islands that stretch 1,300 kilometers. (Thank you wikipedia !) I changed the name from pie to cake, because mine was certainly more like a cake !

Banana & Coconut Cake 

ingredients :

30g butter

2 x 2 heaped tbsps brown sugar (I used coconut sugar)

1 egg

40g shredded coconut or coconut chips

160g plain flour

1tsp baking powder

2 tbsps sesame seeds

Splash of milk (I used coconut milk)

2 ripe bananas, sliced

1/2 can coconut milk

I have lots of coconut products - sugar, flour, jam, ... - that I'm not sure what to do with, so hit me with your recipes to help me use them up !

Preheat the oven to 180°. Cream together the butter and 2tbsp of brown sugar then add in the beaten egg. It doesn't look very appetising at this stage !

I had crunchy coconut chips which gave it some nice texture but you could use shredded or desiccated coconut - whatever you have.

Mix in the coconut and sesame seeds.

Add the flour and mix until it starts forming a ball of dough.

Add a splash of milk and keep going until it comes together as a sticky dough, resembling cookie dough. Put into a greased 20cm cake tin and spread out until it covers the bottom.

Cover with banana slices and sprinkle on the remaining 2tbsp of brown sugar.

Pour over the coconut milk.

Bake for 40 minutes. The coconut milk will froth up and start to be absorbed by the cake. To help it out, I stabbed it all over with a sharp knife so that it could soak up more milk.

Leave to cool and and absorb as much of the milk as possible. Serve cold or warm with a scoop of ice cream, if you want to make it even more indulgent.

*** Don't miss my country-by-country globecooking recipe index ***

This used up some leftover coconut milk, some coconut chips, the end of a jar of sesame seeds and also some of my coconut sugar, so I'm adding it to this month's #KitchenClearout linky.