Banana Sponge Cake

This weekend during the cleaning and waterbed draining/replacing heater/refilling that occured I decided to use the two very ripe bananas that were sitting on my nice clean counter.  They were only brown-ripe not black-ripe so banana bread was out of the question, but also what can you make with only two bananas?  Now a few of you know that I am obsessing about all things British at the moment and I've been looking more and more at foods that they eat and we are unfamiliar with.  One of those things is sponges.  What is a sponge you say?  Well after baking my first one I would say a dense, moist delicious cake!  The original recipe I found here at A Mummy Too is very British with measurements in grams and milliliters (you know, all those logical metric things).  I will share below my "Americanized" version and my thoughts on what I'd do different the next time around.

Banana Sponge Cakes - Americanized
(Not my recipe - I take no credit)

3/4 cup butter (room temp)
1 cup sugar
1 cup self-rising flour
3 medium eggs
1/2 cup milk (I did a smidge more because the conversion was 0.52 cup)
2 small ripe bananas
1/2 cup dark chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 350 degrees (Fahrenheit).  Beat together butter and sugar, add in the eggs, stir in the flour then add the milk.  Mash the bananas in a bowl (I used a fork) and add to the batter.  Add the chocolate chips right at the end and fold in gently.  Line a 12 hole cupcake pan with liners and divide the batter evenly between them.  (Mine were brimming with batter and I had to make a 13th one for the batter that was leftover.  And I still could have scraped the bowl for another...)  Bake for 30 minutes.

They were fantastically banana-ie and the dark chocolate chips are like little morsels of Christmas morning in there.  I thought that some nuts would be good, because I like them in banana bread, so I added some chopped pecans (it was what I had at hand) to the top of half of them.  I also wanted to frost some because that's what was in the original recipe, but I was to lazy to make it from scratch.  So I had to use Nutella instead.  A hardship, I know.  I really can't decide which I like better!!

The nut-topped ones are more breakfast like and the Nutella-topped ones are all late night sinfulness.  I think the next time I might try it as a loaf because they were pretty oily in the cupcake papers, but didn't want to come out easily when you unwrapped them.  Maybe it would come out of a glass dish better?  Ultimately you should make these as soon as you can leave two bananas to go brown-ripe!