Flour on the Floor: when baking gets messy

By Joe Barker

The kitchen always ends up needing a good clean, but I love cooking with my children. Marty has been “helping” me bake since he was about 18 months old, and as Alice has just hit that milestone I thought it was time to introduce her to this family-favorite activity. Whether it’s measuring flour onto the floor, cracking eggs onto the floor, or tipping milk onto the floor, cooking is always a messy experience with my favorite helpers, but their happy giggles make up for my grumpy shouting. 

With the aid of a small child, every recipe takes at least twice as long to prepare as it should, and it’s very rare for all the ingredients to go in in the right order or quantities. Fortunately, our go-to favorite is a very forgiving Banana Bread, that comes out just as delicious no matter how much flour we add or egg we spill. Since we always have a surplus of over-ripe bananas, this recipe is also great for saving on food waste. Best of all, it is a sugar-free recipe and can be packed full of fruit, so that rather than worrying about my expanding waistline, I feel positively virtuous when I reach for a second, or third, slice.

Sugar-Free Banana Bread 

This recipe is taken from the goodFood website: www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/sugar-free-banana-cake 

Ingredients

• 125g wholemeal flour
• ½ tsp baking powder
• 2 tsp ground cinnamon
• 75g sultanas
• 50g butter (melted)
• 2 tsp vanilla essence
• 1 tbsp milk
• 1 egg
• 3 ripe bananas (mashed)

Instructions

Preheat the oven to 180° C and grease a 450g or 1Ib loaf tin.

Mix the dry ingredients together in a bowl. Then put the wet ingredients in a separate bowl and stir them together with a fork or whisk. Finally, combine the wet and dry ingredients and mix thoroughly before pouring into the loaf tin.

Bake for 30-40 minutes, until a skewer inserted into the cake comes out clean.

This is the original recipe, and I’m sure it is delicious, but despite making this bread dozens of times I’ve never managed to follow it exactly. I tend to throw in far too many bananas, and thanks to Marty’s help I usually end up with an extra spoonful or two of flour and half the egg on the floor. Meanwhile I cut the baking powder because my wife claims it ruins the flavor and who can remember where the Vanilla essence is? Spices, on the other hand, we love because banging the spice pot creates exciting colored clouds, so that two teaspoons of cinnamon has become a tablespoon or three of ginger and cinnamon.

I replaced the 50g of butter with 33g of coconut oil because some people think that’s healthier, and the sultanas have been jettisoned in favor of a ridiculous quantity of frozen berries. Mulberries are particularly sweet, but we’ve used everything from blueberries to red currents. I’ve even learnt to microwave the berries before adding them, otherwise the huge quantity of frozen fruit stops the batter from baking properly. The finished product in no way resembles bread, but it’s wonderfully moist, crammed with fruit, and delicious served with yoghurt.

Spiced Zucchini Cake

This recipe was first published in BAMBI Magazine January 2013

I realize that a Banana Bread recipe is hardly exciting, so I’ve trawled our BAMBI archive to find this equally healthy and rather more interesting-sounding Spiced Zucchini Cake recipe from 2013. It was originally contributed by Mette Beyer, who said, "I normally make the cake with, and for, my two-year-old son. I try to teach him that cakes do not have to be very sweet to taste nice." To make it healthier, she reduced the sugar content and added banana instead, although you could also try it with pureed pineapple, apple, or Chinese pears. She also used a mix of rye and all-purpose flour. It results in a dense, lightly sweetened, spicy cake that's surprisingly popular among toddlers and doesn't taste like zucchini, although there are little flecks of green in the batter and the finished cake. It sounds delicious, and, next time I have zucchinis, I’m definitely baking it!

Ingredients

• 3 eggs
• ¾ of a cup of sugar
• ⅔ of a cup of oil   
• 2 cups of coarsely grated zucchini (or 1 large zucchini) 
• ¾ of a cup of rye flour
• 1 ¼  cups of all-purpose flour 
• ¼ tsp baking powder
• 2 tsp baking soda
• ½ tsp salt
• vanilla essence
• 3 tsp cinnamon
• 2 ripe bananas-mashed
• optional: ¾ of a cup of nuts

Instructions

Beat the eggs and sugar until fluffy. Add the vanilla, oil and bananas and continue beating until mixed. In a separate bowl, combine the dry ingredients. Incorporate the dry ingredients into the egg mixture, then add the grated zucchini and optional nuts. 

Pour into a greased 9 inch round cake pan. 

Bake at 200° C until a toothpick inserted into the center of the cake comes out almost clean—usually about 30 minutes. 

I hope you enjoy baking these tasty, healthy treats, and that your kitchen doesn’t take too long to clean afterwards!

About the Author 

Joe and his wife Diane moved to Thailand in 2018. Since the arrival of their son Martin in 2021 and daughter Alice in 2024, Joe has been a stay-at-home father. The whole family enjoys BAMBI playgroups and Thai beach holidays. Find Joe on SubStack: BangkokDad bangkokdad.substack.com/