Banana and Brazil Nut Cake Recipe - my own recipe

I had some bananas that were going a bit squidgy again and so thought I would make a cake with them. 

I decided to try making up a different recipe using brazil nuts and a few other things I had to hand.

It made a lovely cake which was totally consumed in 24 hours, mainly by my husband as I only managed to eat 4 small slices before it all disappeared – and it makes a big cake.

I was debating on icing it but never really had chance before the first chunk disappeared.  So as it was really nice just as an undecorated cake, we were happy.

So here is my recipe:

Banana and Brazil Nut Cake

This recipe is extremely easy.

Turn the oven on to 150 degrees (electric fan oven) – low/medium heat.

Into a large mixing bowl add the following, mixing after each ingredient is added:

4 large Soft Bananas, mashed

4 oz softened Butter

8 oz Caster Sugar

12 oz Self Raising Flour

1 ½ teaspoons Baking Powder

4 XL Eggs (or 5 medium eggs)

4 oz Chopped Brazil Nuts

6 oz Seedless Raisings

1 tablespoon soft Honey

1 teaspoon Cinnamon powder

1 teaspoon Mixed Spice powder

Stir well to mix all the ingredients.

Pour into a large greased circle tin (with the hole in the middle) or a large cake tin.   

(It would probably work in sponge tins if you cooked for only approx.. 30 minutes or bun cases for 15 minutes).

Cook for approx. 70 minutes (until a knife comes out clean).

Best to cover with foil for the last 15 minutes to stop the top burning.

The cake can then be either left as it is or iced, whichever your preference.

Enjoy J

(I have some more recipes on my blog – just look for Recipes down the right hand side).

Finally finished importing the CD's!

I have finally finished putting all the important CD’s on the computer and have 26,172  songs and 180.49GB of them.  

There are a few more - well OK a couple of hundred more - that aren’t as important so I haven’t put on yet – some time, maybe.  

I hate to say it but this may be because they are hubbies CD's that I don't like, so I figure I have done more than my share and if he wants to put them on he is quite welcome to do so.

I realised I hadn't posted this last episode yet so thought I would give you a final update.

I seriously underestimated how many CD’s I have because I thought my turning CD holders contained 125 but I realised it was 125 per side so they really held 250 CD’s each and I had forgotten another place we stored them so there are actually over 2000 CD’s.

Now, of course, I have the even longer problem of selling some of them either on eBay, which is time consuming and costly to keep relisting, or on Amazon.

Of course I hadn’t really thought that I would need a dock for the iPod but I am sure we can make do until I can get one of those as well.

I may have to wait until I get some money from selling some of the CD’s to be able to buy one.  Until then it is earphones only.

Adding so many at once, it was fraught with problems though!

Quite a few CD’s wouldn’t load on to the laptops and I had to do them on the PC.  Some responded with a wipe but most of the awkward ones would only work on the pc.

I had such a problem with some of the CD’s not having any track names, only track numbers, even though they seemed to have track names showing when we put them in to copy.  But when I imported the songs from the laptops on to the main PC I had to check daily to make sure there weren’t any missing the track names.

If any of them were loaded by mistake without the track names I had to check back through all of the CD’s loaded that day to find the right ones and either put them on the PC (which for some reason found the track names even though the laptop hadn’t) or manually put them in.  Very time consuming!

But there would be nothing worse than having a whole load of track numbers with no names of songs, artists, album or even genre.

The first day we got caught out with it as there were 10 Track 01’s etc. and it took me a whole morning to figure out which CD’s hadn’t loaded the names properly. 

The 2^nd day we had another 5 but as we had only deleted the ones with track numbers from the PC, which didn’t delete them from the laptop, we were left with 15 Track 01’s!!! So after that we were more careful and made sure before we imported anything from the laptops to the PC.

Oh boy, did it take me some time to find out something simple like how to add the track names manually!  The instructions said I would need to add them manually if they were not picked up automatically, but what it didn’t say was HOW to add them manually. 

I searched online for the instructions and watched a couple of useless YouTube videos but in the end found some online instructions from an internet site.  It was very easy, once you knew how, like most other things.

What was weird was that some really obscure albums showed the track names and some you would have expected to have had them didn’t!  I put all the ones to be added manually to one side to be added at the end of importing, so we could get the bulk done first.

How could anything that seemed so simple be so hard?  Although I dare say that if there weren’t so many to do at one time, if I’d had a smaller collection or if I already had more on the Windows Media Player beforehand, then it would have been an awful lot easier!

And the latest problem – we realised that the iPod can’t play on any of the computers because it just tries to sync the songs from that computer and overwrite the ones already on there.  

So that knocks out the portable laptops, and the only other devices we have for playing music don’t have any input sockets so we have got to buy a dock if we want to listed without earphones!

It’s a good job I hadn’t realised how much it would cost in time and money beforehand just to put the music on a computer so we can get rid of the CD’s to gain some space in the house or I would never have done it.

One for the Ladies – Really!!! What do they expect?

Why is it that some men seem to think that on social media sites they can pick up women by saying something stupid like “I like you – we get together”?  You know all the stupid in your face comments that someone you have never ever spoken to before say on your posts.  

I have forgotten most of the comments but there are so many messages like this!  And for the sake of keeping this blog “clean” I wont even repeat some of the messages.

Don’t get me wrong – I don’t mean ALL men are like this and men from Western countries would know never to act like this, but there is a whole group of men from Eastern countries that seem to think it is the right way to start a conversation with a woman – even in the middle of a thread sometimes.

Do they walk up to women in the street where they live and say the same thing?  If so, do they really expect a good response?  Or do they think we are different and will be overwhelmed by their attention?

Men’s chat-up lines have always been a bit of a joke – “Do you come here often”, “I haven’t seen you here before”, “What’s a nice looking girl like you doing here on your own” etc., but men never used to be quite so direct as the Eastern men are on social media sites.

Do they really expect us ladies to respond and start chatting to them online?  What’s more, what do they expect to achieve from it anyway.  They live half way across the world for heaven’s sake. 

Do they think we will pay for them to come over to see us and marry them so they can get out of their country?  Do they think we are any better than their own women?  What is the fascination with trying to chat up women so far away anyway?

Surely they should realise that the softly softly get to know her approach would be the better option as their direct approach is an automatic turn-off and block.