Date, Walnut and Ginger loaf

This is a Good Food recipe. Only it isn't.

Well, xmas is over and therefore we have leftovers - in this case, some dates which Mum got given in a hamper. I like dates, she likes dates, but there were still way too many for just the two of us to eat. So off I went in search of a date and walnut CAKE recipe. Not loaf. I wanted an actual cake.

Well, it seems that anything that says cake, date and walnut in the title actually goes in a loaf tin when you get to the nitty gritty of the recipe, and I guess you could probably try and cook it as an actual cake, maybe, but I'd hazard a guess that it might not go so well and I'm a bit sick of baking disasters at the moment (there was a self-saucing pudding that I'm trying to blank from my memory).

So onwards to this recipe. I found it in my Kindle edition of BBC Good Food's 101 Cakes and Bakes, which has yet to fail me. I bought this on my Kindle when I spent 7 weeks in Indonesia experiencing severe baking withdrawal... I bought and read several cookbooks cover to cover, bookmarking every recipe I wanted to try when I got back from the paradise island of Gili Trawangan. I think I might have so far made about 3. Out of maybe a hundred. But still.

So yes, out of all the recipes I'd seen, this one appealed to me most, but I made a few substitutions. The recipe calls for honey - we never have it in the house and if I bought a jar no-one would use it, so the internet told me I could use golden syrup in a 1:1 ratio and I can confirm it worked. Also, halfway through baking it I realised our spice cupboard contained ginger, parsley and 3 tubs of chili powder, and only one of those would be remotely suitable in a recipe calling for cinnamon. But I can also confirm that the ginger does work in this situation, though if I made the cake again I would probably try it with cinnamon just for the comparison. Oh, and I didn't have any light brown sugar, only dark brown and caster. So I mixed it up a bit...

So here's my modified recipe, with a link to the original too.


I want to make this cake even though I am missing several key ingredients



225g self-raising flour
½ tsp ground ginger
175g softened butter
65g dark brown sugar
35g caster sugar
3 tbsp golden syrup
2 eggs , beaten
2 medium, ripe bananas , about 250g/9oz total weight in their skins
100g stoned dates
50g walnut pieces

Preheat the oven to 160 (140 fan). Grease and line a loaf tin.

Add the flour (sifted), ginger, butter, sugars, 2tbsp of golden syrup and eggs to a bowl. Mash the bananas in another bowl and then stone the dates before cutting them into chunks, and add these two to the bowl as well. Mix with an electric mixer, food processor on relatively low, or a wooden spoon, until relatively smooth (there will still be chunks of date, hopefully!). Pour the batter into the loaf tin.

If you have walnut halves, break them into smaller chunks. Place the walnut pieces on top of the batter.

Cook for 1 hour then prod the top. Give it an extra 10 minutes if the top is not firm. Mine needed this extra 10 badly! It made all the difference.

Remove it from the tin about 15 mins after cooking. When it's close to cool, drizzle the last tbsp of golden syrup over (might want to warm it in the microwave for 10 seconds first to make it easier to drizzle.