Cubicle kitchen: Banana Velvet Loaf Cake

There are lots of ways to save people.  When you donate blood, they like to tell you that you saved two lives.  That certainly feels good, knowing that for very little effort you can play an important role in someone's physical ability to breathe in and out.

On a much smaller scale, though, feeding people baked goods does its own kind of saving.  When I brought this to our coffee klatch, one of my coworkers took two slices and exclaimed that this was just what he needed to make his day better.  That also feels good.

To make sure that my iron levels were high enough to donate, I consciously made an effort to eat foods high in iron.  Last time the blood drive came through, I missed the cut by one point.  Along with my daily multivitamin, I had shrimp for dinner a few night, and tried beet greens for the first time.  I sautéed both leaves and stems with garlic, which was actually pretty tasty.  And with the deep, vibrant colors, you just know you're getting lots of tasty vitamins.

While chocolate cake doesn't immediately appear to be similarly nutritious, when it's made with a couple of mashed bananas instead of butter or oil, it's not without redeeming factors.  Plus, there's the old standby excuse of it being food that's good for you...good for your soul.

Banana Velvet Loaf Cake
Recipe from One Good Thing: Simple Three-Ingredient Banana Bread

My notes:

• I used Mam Papaul's Black Velvet cake mix (saving the frosting mix for another time)
• I added Peanut M&Ms into the batter, and sprinkled some dried banana chip pieces on top
• This makes a very moist cake.  The recipe calls it banana bread, but I think loaf cake is much more accurate.  As one person remarked, this is much more like an indulgent chocolate brownie with banana than a banana bread with cocoa.
• I made a full-sized loaf in a 11" x 6" pan, and a little mini loaf using a 4" x 2.5" pan for one of my mom's co-workers who celebrated a birthday.  The full-sized loaf took closer to an hour to bake, while the mini loaf was closer to 20 minutes.