VeganMOFO Iron Chef Challenge #2 Mochanana Cake!

OK! Banana and coffee then… I tried to be really clever and think of something savoury. Maybe a coffee BBQ sauce on faux chicken and fried plantain with lime. Green banana – is that acceptable? I didn’t like the sound of it, so I decided to make a cake. I wanted to make it a bit different so I scoured the internet until I found an interesting method for making a chequered cake of sorts. I adapted a couple of recipes from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World to come up with the Mochanana Cake. It’s a combination of mocha (coffee and chocolate) and banana. That’s the challenge met now to see if the cake would be any good..

First I made a right mess in the kitchen making the mocha cake!

I didn’t have expresso powder so I warmed the soya milk in the recipe for 15 minutes with a generous spoon of freshly ground filter coffee in it and strained it through a cafetière. This leant quite a strong coffee flavour to the mix.

Then I made the banana cake, omitting the cocoa Isa’s recipe has in it so that it comes out a golden colour, not brown!

Once the two sponge cakes were cool, I cut a 5” circle out of the middle of each and a 3” circle out of the middle of that, as shown.

I then assembled the cake with alternating segments using coffee-flavoured frosting to ‘glue’ it together.

The top was covered in chocolate ganache to hide the pattern!

The slices came out OK but I think if I make it again I would liquidise the banana to make a smoother sponge. It was a touch on the moist side coz of all the lumpy bits of fruit.

I’m invited round to a friend’s for dinner tonight and I’m taking the cake for desert. It’s going to be an evening of interesting combinations; they are cooking fake steak stuffed with fake blue cheese!