Banana Cake, Plus

When the weather warms up, bananas ripen pretty fast. Consequently, I found myself with a bunch of ripe bananas, too soft to eat, but perfect for baking. I have a collection of favorite banana-based recipes that I often turn to, but in a moment of downtime earlier in the week, I dug up a banana cake recipe from the Better Homes & Gardens Web site.

On Tuesday, I made one 9x13 banana cake. I still had leftover ripe bananas, so on Wednesday, I made one more 9x13 cake with the intention of making a big layer cake. I made two different frostings for this concoction: the center is filled with peanut butter buttercream, and the top gets a chocolate fudge frosting.

The result? This might be one of my favorite banana cakes. Lots of banana flavor, due no doubt to the ripe fruit. The cake is remarkably tender and moist, too, a benefit of the way it's made; the butter and liquids are beaten into the dry ingredients, and then the eggs are added. It's a reverse-creaming technique. The only change I made from the original recipe was using butter instead of shortening as the fat in the cake. Assuming that the only reason shortening was called for was due to its softness, I let the butter sit at room temperature til it was soft. The butter adds some nice notes to the cake, much more pleasant than nondescript shortening would have been.