Bananas are an essential kitchen item in many households, enjoyed in a variety of dishes. While their nutritional value differs slightly depending on how ripe they are, and they’re often sweeter as they start to brown, they’re a great source of potassium and fibre in our diets.

Keeping bananas fresh for longer can be tricky, and the yellow fruit is notorious for having a short shelf life, quickly browning in our fruit bowl. This is because they produce a large amount of ethylene gas, a naturally occurring substance that causes fruit to ripen quickly. There are a number of methods out there to avoid bananas ripening so quickly, from wrapping the stems in tinfoil to keeping them in the fridge, but ripe bananas can also be a great natural sweetener used in a number of recipes.

In a video posted on Instagram, Lauren Levya shared a recipe that uses up those blackened, overly ripe bananas you have lying around.

In the caption, she wrote: “We throw away 1.4 billion edible bananas every day here in the UK”, so not only is this a delicious and plant-based recipe, but it is also a way to reduce food going to waste.

While a brown, overripe banana has 17g of sugar per 100g, making it an ideal ingredient in baking, the recipe does call for quite a bit of sugar.

How to make chocolate banana cake

Ingredients:

Method:

Preheat the oven to 170C and line a 20-25cm square or circular baking tin with butter.

In a large bowl, mix together the plain flour, baking soda and salt. Mash the bananas and add these to a seperate, large mixing bowl.

Gently microwave the margarine for 15-20 seconds until melted, and mix in the sugar. Add the margarine-sugar mixture to the banana and mix well.

Mix the bananas into the flour mixture along with the vanilla extract and beat for a few minutes. Roughly chop up the chocolate into chunks.

Pour most of the mixture into the prepared tin. Scatter half of the chopped chocolate over it, and add a layer on top of the rest of the cake mixture.

Place the raspberries evenly on top of the mixture and sprinkle the sugar on top. Bake for 40-50 minutes until cooked through and golden brown on top.

When baked, remove it from the oven and gently melt the remaining 100g of chocolate in the microwave before drizzling it over the top.