Best Ever Banana Cake

Best Ever Banana Cake is a huge name to live up to, but this cake does just that.

It is ultra-moist and filled with the flavors of ripe bananas, nutty pecans, and tangy buttermilk. But it is definitely more cake-like than bread-like. Think Carrot Cake texture and density with bananas instead of carrots.

The recipe begins with, surprise, surprise, BANANAS. Sweet, ripe bananas. The smell of bananas is not subtle in this recipe. It is in-your-face screaming “Here I am.”

Mixing the batter is a little time consuming and messy. It took three bowls in all. One for the bananas, one for the dry, and one for the sugar/butter creaming. 

 And the recipe makes A LOT of batter. This one could easily be cut in half. I wanted to make cupcakes instead of one large cake, and I ended up with 24 cupcakes and 3 mini tube cakes. If I had had the room in my oven I would have 36 cupcakes, but the three trays just wouldn’t fit.  Mama wants a double oven for Christmas.

Here is a link to the "Best Ever Banana Cake" recipe on Food.com and the 1100+ reviews. Read a few pages of reviews before you bake the cake. Base on the reviews I did modify the recipe and reduced the sugar from 2-1/8 cups down to 1-3/4 cups. For me it had the perfect level of sweetness, but if you prefer a more bread-like taste you might want to reduce the amount of sugar even more.

I baked the cupcakes for 21 minutes at 325 degrees, and the moistness was perfect. Not too wet, not too dry. I also skipped the “freezer” step where you take the cake from the oven and pop it into the freezer for 45 minutes. None of the many reviewers thought this improved the cake to any great degree so I didn’t bother rearranging my freezer to accommodate all the pans.

It was my weeks to bring treats for the “Cake Club” at work, so I brought these as my offering. They were a huge hit. Everything was gone in 45 minutes and I got 5 requests for the recipe! 5! That is an all-time record.

This Best Ever Banana Cake sure does live up to its name.  Open wide...

One Direction (In Concert) Cake

My niece said she wanted a Niall Horan cake for her birthday.

“Who?” I asked in confusion.

“You know, Niall Horan.  One Direction,” she replied.

“Who?” I asked again still not understanding.

She gave me a look of comic disbelief and proceeded to give me all the details of the most recent boy-band, teenage heart-throbs: Niall, Zayn, Liam, Harry, & Louis. She dragged me to her room and in the week since my last visit she had redecorated her walls. Gone was poor Justin and in his place was Niall.

Ooookayyyyy. That was a fast. But who am I to question tween love.

So I got busy searching the internet for “One Direction” themed cakes and found a few with a concert stage theme that I liked. A lot of the cakes had hand molded band members, but due to limited time and mediocre talent I decided to just buy some One Direction plastic figures to go on top of my cake.

They figures I found are actually very cute. They are only about 3 inches tall and they look like bobble heads, but the heads do not move. But even without the bobble they are still adorable.

To go with the concert stage theme, I decided to include a backdrop that would look like a large silhouette of the band members. I printed out the silhouette and then used the paper copy to make a duplicate version out of Satin Ice Gum Paste.

I later used edible spray paint to color it black. I guess I could have just tinted the gum paste black, but I already had the paint so I figure I would give that method a try. The paint worked okay, but it was delicate and easily smudged. The silhouette was also very fragile so I glued it (with white chocolate) to a piece of square, white gum paste.

I also cut out gum paste British phone booths to be part of the backdrop.  Who remembers Dr. Who and the Tardis (although his' was blue).  The white gum paste phone booths (and a "1D" logo) were sprayed with red edible paint.

The white, cream cheese icing look a little stark, so I painted that silver. Guess I went a little crazy with the spray paint.

Here is the half-finished cake chilling in the refrigerator. The cake is Red Velvet and the frosting is Cream Cheese. I had to keep the cake chilled because of the frosting kept melting.  Gotta love New Orleans in August where temps top 95 and the humidity is 110%.

The multicolored “crowd” in front of the stage is just a paper cutout. I was going to make it out of gum paste, but as usual I ran out of time. Even after all these years decorating cakes I still can’t predicate how long it is going to take to prepare and assemble the decorations. I always seem to run short of time.

Here is the finished product.  I wish I would have put  Niall on the cake with the rest of the guys and tilted the 1D logo up so you could see it better.  But c'est la vie.  That's life.

And sadly this is what happened to all that time and effort. It is frightening that it only takes a few seconds to destroy what took hours to create.

But at least the birthday girl got to keep the little 1D figurines. She added them to the 1D shrine that she calls her bedroom.

Happy Birthday, Amanda.

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