chocolate banana cake (a la Sam)

Weigh out roughly 200g plain flour - recipe actually calls for 225g self-raising flour but that's close enough. Add three and a half tsp of baking powder, you forget how much you're actually supposed to use.

Don't bother to sift. Just put in mixing bowl with 2 tbsp of cocoa powder and 1 tbsp hot chocolate because you've run out of cocoa.

Stir in 75g light brown sugar (you should use 115g, but you only have 75g or so left). Mix.

Make a well in the centre and add zero tbsp malt extract (as you never had any ever), roughly 2 tbsp golden syrup, 2 eggs (minus 1, because you forgot to check how many you actually have), 4 tbsp water (in lieu of the skimmed milk that's not in the fridge), 3 tbsp vegetable oil.
Also add 2 large ripe bananas (plus an extra half banana, to make up for there not being enough egg). Realise you were supposed to mash them beforehand so mush them up with a spoon in the bowl (but you HAVE remembered to take the skins off first!). Mix everything together.

Pour into a cake tin you never bother to grease and line.

Turn body to put tin into oven that housemate is using at roughly the right temperature. Move rapidly to one side as said housemate dashes past and asks to use the grill first 'for just a minute or two'. Sit at kitchen table for next twenty minutes, until oven is finally free. Sit cake tin in oven even though the grill has heated it up to 200 degrees celsius at the top (but have presence of mind to put it on a lower shelf). Turn thermostat to 160 degrees celsius and go away.

Come back later having realised you forget to check the time when you put the cake in. Then find it doesn't matter because oven has turned itself off anyway. Test cake by stabbing the middle with a knife. Still not done. Turn the timer for another 15 minutes and go away again.

Come back after 25 minutes. Cake is done. Surprisingly good, though still too sweet, despite using less sugar and less golden syrup.

Go back to desk, ignoring the imp that's been sitting on your cerebral tissue randomly jabbing needles into your pain sensory centre all day. Blog about it because the imp is making it too difficult to blog about all the things you really care about, like GM crops, biofuels, medicine availability and child worker exploitation.

Eat cake after blog entry has been written.