Hi, foodies in the Hive!

I hope you're doing great. I've been meaning to make this cake since most of the "topocho" bananas left are ripe. I finally got to make it yesterday and now I can share it with my fellow foodies.

Thank you so much, @foodiesunite for keeping this space open, our dear @sirenahippie for hosting it, and our witness @sagarkothari88 and @ecency for sponsoring it 😁 This time the challenge was for chocolate cake 😋

Ever since I realized I was mildly allergic to gluten like twenty years ago, I've tried to cut down on wheat flour--and many other products--. This is the main reason why I started using bananas and plantain in cakes and breads.

Chocolate and bananas make an extraordinary duo when it comes to cakes. In fact, I might've used no flour at all for this cake, but I had no unripe bananas left which are the ones that make the dough turn more caky than chewy, and I needed this cake to be good to go with coffee.

...to share with my friends at a Podcast workshop I'm taking. My dear friend @bertrayo said it was good. I want to believe he was being more sincere than kind 😂 (BTW, in the end, we had no coffee...)

This cake has a more compact texture than a regular chocolate cake. Also topocho bananas add some acidity which I enhanced with a little lemon juice; the latter also makes the cake soften. Now, I'll tell you what I used this time.

Ingredients

For the chocolate cake:

1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 kg ripe topochos
250 gr self-rising wheat flour
100 gr melted margarine
1/2 cup eggs
1 cup sugar
4 tablespoons lemon juice
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon vanilla essence

For the chocolate topping:

I used an all-purpose chocolate bar, but if you want to give the topping more shine, just add a couple of tablespoons of coconut oil.

My idea regarding this topping was not to make it too thick so I could use it to coat the individual cake portions; that's why I didn't add starch or egg yolks.

I used

100gr chocolate
150 ml condensed milk
1 tablespoon margarine

The most important ingredient here after CHOCOLATE is ripe bananas. I used this variety which is a staple in my hometown: topocho.

Topochos are in fiber and starch, which will make a lot of good to your digestion. We regularly use them while unripe as a side or in soups, but we can make delicious cakes with ripe topochos and save us some or all the sugar we would normally add.

You can check out my last recipe using unripe topochos here:
Flavorful & Healthy "Topocho" Banana Flatbreads (free of gluten, fat and salt).

As Easy as ABC

To make this cake, I used my blender. It did most of the work for me.

First of all, I peel the bananas and cut them into pieces just small enough not to miss the blender blades.

I added the cocoa powder,

sugar,

melted margarine,

eggs,

lemon juice,

baking soda, ground cinnamon, and vanilla essence.

Once all the ingredients, except for the flour, are inside the glass, you can turn the blender on.

I like to fold the flour because it makes fluffier cakes. So I sifted the flour into a bowl and then poured in the cake mix...

...and floded it.

I used a simple 18" bundt cake mold which fit perfectly into my little electric oven. I prefer to use this small oven, as the large gas oven emits a lot of heat. The heat here is already oppressive without turning on the gas oven.

I poured all the mixture into the mold well greased with margarine only.

It is quite a thick mixture...

So I rotated the pan on its axis so that the mixture was evenly distributed.

The texture of this cake is a little dense but really soft. When we take the cake out of the oven, we can see that the cake overflows the edges of the pan, but in the next ten minutes it progressively drops about 15% and becomes less spongy--the same that happens to brownies--. In spite of this, the texture is still very soft and pleasant. This moist is a plus that we get from using ripe bananas in the cake mix.

I unmolded the cake while it was still hot. As you can see, there is a crack; this then partially disappeared as the cake set.

What I want you to see here is that the cake comes out very easily leaving the mold practically clean and that, in addition, it is a mixture that has enough air in it.

The air in the mixture makes the surface porous enough to absorb enough of the chocolate topping. This makes the texture even more pleasant. And it also makes it possible for you to eat the cake with your hands if you let it set for a day; This is very useful if you don't want to dirty plates and cutlery.

Making the topping is the eaisest thing. I mixed all the ingredients in a saucier and let it cook over medium-high heat while constantly stirring with my silicon pastry spoon.