Another Banana Cake

Once again, I was unable to resist the allure of a huge bag of bananas on the dented-and-dinged rack at Stew's. These bananas were very green at the time of purchase a week ago and only now are ripe enough for use in baking. Today, I tried a Banana Cake recipe from the new Dede Wilson birthday-cake book. The cake has some chopped toasted pecans and mini-chocolate chips in it. For filling between the layers, I used some leftover truffle base (dark rum and toasted coconut), and I frosted the cake with a mango-flavored ganache. I really like the voluptuous swirls in the frosting. I think I'll take this to work tomorrow for a belated Lost Lunch Thursday.

I'm not exactly sure what I'll do with the rest of the bananas, but I know I've got several things to bake for before the week is over. No doubt some (most? all?) of it will involve bananas.

Two Birthdays

We started November with a couple of work birthdays within a couple of days of each other. For the first birthday, I made Golden Applesauce Pound Cake from Marcy Goldman's A Passion for Baking. I used some homemade applesauce for this cake. The recipe calls for golden raisins, which I didn't have, so I substituted dried cranberries. All in all, a nice autumnal cake.

For the second birthday, I made Banana Chocolate Chip Cake from Carole Walter's Great Coffee Cakes, Sticky Buns, Muffins & More. This cake is a trip. Based on the ingredient list, which includes cake flour and superfine sugar, I figured that this would be a cake with a fine texture. But never before have I gone the extra step of straining mashed bananas for a cake. In the end, I think it made a difference and contributed to the cake's silken texture. This is an excellent banana cake, strained bananas and all.

Banana Snack Cake

The other day, I was lurking at Cook's Talk, the online forum at Fine Cooking magazine, and saw a thread for banana cake. That reminded me of the two overripe bananas on the counter at home. Much to my complete delight, someone at the forum posted a recipe for a banana snack cake that sounded pretty simple to put together. Before I took Claire to her Girl Scout meeting, I set out the refrigerated ingredients so that they could come to room temperature, and also assembled the dry ingredients. Then, while Claire was at her meeting, I made the cake batter, got it in the oven, and had the cake done before I needed to head out the door to pick her up.

This cake is very good. It's extremely moist and bakes up tall in the pan. You could eat it plain, I suppose, or if you happen to have any leftover chocolate frosting sitting around the house (I mean, seriously, who doesn't?), you could finish it off with that. I've been thinking that this cake could be really good split into two layers, filled with frosting and sliced bananas, then frosted on the top and sides.

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.