I’m not sure I can face either baking or eating another banana bread for quite some time, so when a couple of bananas turned black and soggy, I consulted an eccentric little recipe book for guidance and came up with a ridiculous twist on a banana slice.
The recipe book is called Manna From Heaven. It was produced in 1991 by the ladies of All Saints Cathedral in Bathurst, the Australian town where I went to high school and university. My mother, herself a lady of All Saints Cathedral, at some point gifted me a copy of this cookbook and it made its way with me to London. The cookbook is rather thick, appears to have been typeset on a manual typewriter, does not have an index and the measurements vary wildly between metric and imperial, sometimes in the same recipe. But it is full of gems, proper home-cooking classics, the fodder of many a cathedral cake stall.
I had a hunch I’d find a banana slice recipe lurking in the well-thumbed pages and I was right. It was a banana and date slice but I decided to use the very basics of this to make a banana slice that was inspired by a Snickers bar. The flavours of nuts, caramel and chocolate would, I figured, go well with the banana slice base, all cooked up as a tray bake.
This recipe requires a little time and patience but the results are worth it, even if my husband and I had massive sugar rushes from the multiple opportunities to lick bowls and beaters.