Kiwi’s love their feijoas, but we had trouble getting hold of them in other parts of the world. So if you don’t know what a feijoa is, I recommend you see if you can track some down. These are an awesome little autumn fruit, and we have two trees in our back garden which are currently dropping heaps of fruit. If you like feijoas you will like this cake. The trick to getting a really feijoaey (is that a word?) flavour is to grate the feijoas, skin and all into the cake. Cooking seems to reduce the feijoa flavour a bit. But if this weirds you out a bit (people don’t normally eat the skins) you can peel the feijoas before grating. This recipe is based on the Edmond’s Cookery Book Banana Cake recipe.
Ingredients:
Cake:
125 g butter
3/4 cup sugar
2 free-range eggs or 125g pot of Greek yoghurt (e.g. for egg allergies)
6 feijoas, washed and flower ends cut off
2 cups self-raising flour
1 teaspoon of baking soda
1/4 cup hot trim milk
Lemon butter icing:
2 cups of icing sugar
a knob of butter
juice and rind of 1 lemon
Instructions:
Preheat oven to 180°C (356°F).
Cream together butter and sugar in a food processor until light and fluffy. Add free-ranges eggs one at a time. Replace the blade in the food processor with the grating attachment and grate the 6 feijoas into the wet ingredients.
Sieve the self-raising flour into a large bowl and make a well in the centre.
Boil 1/4 cup of milk in the microwave and add 1 teaspoon of baking soda to it. It will froth up.
Pour the frothy milk and the other wet ingredients into the well in the flour. Fold to combine ingredients. Pour mixture into a greased cake tin.
Bake at 180°C (356°F) for about 50 minutes. Allow cake to cool.
Combine ingredients for icing. Heat in the microwave to soften butter and mix until combined. Spread over cake.
What the kids can do:
Hand washing: Don’t forget to get the kids (and grownups too of course) to wash their hands before you start. Little hands always seem to end up touching everything, including the ingredients. This is extra important given the current Covid-19 situation. For good 20 second hand wash, have them sing “happy birthday to me” twice.
Eggs: Pro tip for breaking eggs with a 4 year old, break eggs into a separate glass bowl before adding to your other ingredients. That way you can see and pick out any bits of shell before they are added in by mistake. I like to use free range eggs, because it is kinder to the chickens, and they also taste better. Bear in mind that raw eggs can carry Salmonella so wash little hands if they end up the raw egg. I also don’t recommend eating raw cake batter, just in case.
Mixing the ingredients: My daughter helped mix all the ingredients. The biggest messes seen to happen when sifting and mixing dry ingredients with the kids. A great tip from reader Dana M is to put a towel down underneath, which catches any stray ingredients for easy cleaning. When folding wet into dry ingredients, you want to mix thoroughly, but not too much or the cake will go flat. This usually requires the grown up to either finish off the mixing and/or intervene before things are mixed too much.
Icing the cake: Miss 5 likes to grate the rind of the lemon – keep an eye on it though, because she tends to grate the same spot over and over and you get a lot of pith in there. She also helped spread the icing on the cake, though the help of a grownup was required to ensure it was evenly spread across the whole cake and not just in one direction.
Keeping Them Occupied 