Time to bake cake

It appears that we’ve reached that time in first term when we all begin to realise how much work we have to do this year. It can all get a bit depressing, unless we use the medium of cake to momentarily ease our burdens. Here are three simple recipes to bake your way out of despair.

Five minute chocolate mug cake

Alas, cake now takes a dangerously small sliver of time to be in your belly. Here’s how:

Mix 4 flat tbsps caster sugar, 4 flat tbsps self-raising flour and 2 flat tbsps cocoa powder. Add an egg, 2 tbsps oil (anything but olive) and 3 tbsps milk. Mix again then add optional chocolate chips or broken up chocolate bar. Heat in 700W microwave for 3 and 1/2 minutes or a 1000W microwave for 3 minutes. Hey presto, immediate cake. Probably best to save for cake emergencies.

Exceptionally easy chocolate cheesecake

Ingredients

250g digestive biscuits

250g ginger nut biscuits

500g cream cheese

400g chocolate (200g dark, 200g milk)

100g butter

Method

Smash biscuits in a bag until they’re in crumbs. (The perfect way to relieve some stress). Melt butter in microwave and mix in a bowl with crushed biscuits. Press mixture firmly into base of serving dish.  Simmer a small amount of water in a pan and melt the chocolate in a bowl placed on top of it. When melted, mix with cream cheese. Spread over the biscuit base. Place dish in the fridge until the top layer has set firmly.

 Adapt to make a white chocolate and raspberry cheesecake by using 400g white chocolate instead of dark and milk, and splash out on a box of raspberries. Crush the raspberries and mix them into the cream cheese and white chocolate mixture.

Bloaf! (Banana loaf)

Bananas always seem to be lurking in the back of someone’s kitchen cupboard in our house, and last year I made this cake almost every week – and it always disappeared within the space of a few hours. Banana cake is always better if the bananas are getting a bit old, brown and squidgy – so you’re performing a service, really, by not wasting them!

Ingredients

 60g butter

100g Demerara sugar

2 eggs, beaten

2 tablespoons milk

3 bananas, mashed

250g self-raising flour

Method

Preheat oven to 200^oC. Grease a bread-loaf tin (or ordinary cake tin, if you don’t have one). Cream butter and sugar then add beaten eggs a third at a time. Combine milk and mashed banana in a separate bowl and add mixture alternately with sifted flour. Pour into prepared tin and bake for 25 minutes, or until a skewer comes cleanly out of the cake.

Perfect slathered with butter cream and topped with sliced bananas.