It has been almost a month since my last post.
I am so sorry.
Read MoreBanana and Feijoa Cake
This cake uses probably the best cake tin I have ever experienced. I only made this cake because of this tin. I didn't care for the cake itself, I just wanted to try this baby out.
Linda at work scored the bargain of the year at the recycling shop. It was this old, massive heart shaped cake tin and she got it for a song! (ie $1!!!) Yes one dollar. I am so jealous. It is the sturdiest tin I have ever seen and looks like it has been through a war or two. It would make an excellent fruit cake. So generously she offered to let me borrow it so the next day at work I walked home with this beautiful baby in my arms (quite literally my arms were wrapped around it in a caring an loving manner).
Re-wind back to last Sunday.
My love of baking was gone. I feared I would never bake a cake again. At least never for another boy again! My secret ingredient in all my baking is love and all that was left of my love supply was a few measly stale crumbs at the bottom of the barrel (yes I usually have quite a lot of love hence the massive but empty barrel). I think what I was most annoyed about was the amount of butter I wasted on him. So annoyed! Do you know how much that stuff is going for these days?
On Wednesday I met up with my friend Evan for coffee and he reassured me that not all boys are as dumb as what I had been believing at the time. Anyway, long story short my frown had been turned upside down and I bounced back to the lab and proceeded to have an excellent day (despite being up to my elbows in a very foul smelling milk experiment).
To say thank you for this restoration of faith and to celebrate my renewed stash of baking-grade love I decided to bake a cake.
Well it turned out to be nine cakes.
Nine small cakes.
We had debated the merits of the old feijoa (for those who don't know what a feej is, google it). I am not a fan of the feej but Mr Evan is. A compromise was made when it was decided that the best way to eat a feej is in a feijoa and banana cake.
So feijoa and banana cake it was going to be.
I wanted to use a Texan muffin pan to make large but still individually portioned cakes. I made a single banana cake recipe and it managed to fill nine patty cases really rather nicely.
They turned out wonderful. But alas I did not take any photos of them.
It was a shame to waste such a good cake recipe and not share it with you guys so out of duty I decided to make another.
Fast forward to Saturday.
I had this tin. It was marvellous. I needed a good reliable cake that was going to stay moist and luscious.
Enter my friend Lars.
It was a Saturday night, neither of us had anything cool to do so I was like, hey, come over and lets bake a cake then you can take it back to your flat. Win win. I get to blog about a cake and not have to eat it all myself and his flat gets a cake. It was a perfect arrangement. And I have to say he is the best banana and feijoa masher I have ever seen.
This is Lars. Does he not have the most excellent mop of hair ever?
He thought he was fast enough to avoid being snapped. Guts for him.
#Larshasluscioushair
I had to make a double recipe, just so that it would fill the tin a few centimetres deep!
Basically all you have to do is add a few extra feijoas to the mix and you are good to go. They were really expensive at the supermarket so we only added six to the entire cake. I would suggest at least five good mushy ones for each cake recipe you make (as in I really should have added around 10 feijoas to mine).
The moment this cake came out of the oven was one of the proudest of my cake making life. The top was so flat, it had pulled ever so slightly away from the edges making removing it a dream!
Then we just simply iced it with a light and fluffy vanilla buttercream icing and we were good to go!
If you are doing a really large cake and you double this recipe, reduce the temperature to 170 degrees and increase the bake time to an hour to seventy minutes testing with a clean knife every ten minutes from the fifty minute mark. Cooking time will depend on depth of cake. If the top gets too brown, cover with tin foil and return to the oven.
Banana and Feijoa Cake
a single recipe for a normal 23cm cake
125g butter, softened
3/4 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 1/2 cup plain flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
3 small mushy bananas, mashed
5-6 very ripe feijoas, mashed
Preheat the oven to 180 degrees and line and grease your cake tin.
Cream together the butter and sugar until light and creamy. Add in the eggs one at a time and beat until as fluffy and voluminous as it can get. Add in the vanilla and mix.
Mix in your mashed banana and feijoa.
Sift in the flour, baking powder and baking soda and gently mix until just combined but the batter is smooth and there are no flour lumps.
Pour the mixture into the prepared tin, smooth out and bake for 35 minutes or until a clean knife or skewer comes out clean.
Once the cake has completely cooled, ice with a simple vanilla butter cream.
Cream together 40g softened butter with three cups of icing sugar a teaspoon of vanilla and a wee splash of milk. Beat until fluffy. You can add more milk if its not smooth enough or more icing sugar if you need a bit more icing.
Slap this on the cake and you are now ready to consume! And consume you certainly will as this cake is so moist!
Enjoy!!!
Oh yeah, this cake is great for breakfast too!
Baby Banana and Caramel Cakes with Vanilla Bean Cream Cheese Icing
I tried to explain to my parents that baking Jack banana cakes was a sibling bonding activity and that they should appreciate the fact that we don't fight and hate each other and therefore is totally necessary.
They bought it.
Yuss another baking escapade completed without too much parental hate. Having me in the house is like living in a bakery. You get chubs. There is always cake or something delicious around to munch on. I think they enjoy it when I leave. Wait, there is no 'I think' about it. I know they love to see me hop on that plane to Dunedin where they don't have to see/live with me for months at a time.
Anyway Jack and his friend Will (Hi Will!) were going to the gym together and they needed post gym nutrition. I don't know where they got the idea that banana cake was a good option for post exercise sustenance but regardless, I was going to be the source of this cake.
Ever since receiving my Treats from Little and Friday book for Christmas I have been wanting to try something out.
The problem with this book, whilst it looks beautiful, all the recipes have hideous quantities of ingredients and last time I checked I didn't have my body weight of eggs and chocolate lying around the house. The same with the ground nuts that are required for a few of the cakes. Seriously, who can afford 4 cups of ground hazelnuts for a spot of afternoon treat baking?
The one small cake recipe that wasn't atrociously expensive to make was the mini banana cakes. They used the recipe from the Edmonds cookbook but frilled it up with a few lashing and dashings of cream cheese icing, mascarpone and caramel.
It said it would make 12 small texan muffin pan sized cakes.
Negative.
It said to use a texas muffin tin that had the sides lined up with baking paper so that the cakes could be made quite tall. I ended up making 6 smallish texas sized ones (I didn't know how far to fill them so a erred on the side of caution) and used some of the left over batter to make 3 small baby bundt ones. The batter definitely wouldn't have made 12 large ones. Awkward.
The next weridity was the amount of mashed banana the recipe required. Your standard banana cake recipe calls for around about 3 ripe bananas.
Haha but not this one.
It called for three CUPS of mashed banana. I mashed up four bananas and that only achieved one and a half cups. Who has eight bananas lying around for SIX wee cakes. I am hoping it was a typo. I only added four bananas worth. You could probably increase this to five bananas and that would make it quite moist but also a wee bit on the dense side.
I don't know about you but I am all into simple methods. Methods that are minimalist on the word front because seriously who can be bothered reading methods when there is cake to be had! The method for these had a crazy number of steps (one of which was to sift the flour into a separate bowl - uuuh extra dishes anyone?). So here I am going to condense all these steps into a more manageable and easy to read format.
The caramel I used was from a tin of condensed milk that I had boiled away (in the sealed tin!) for three hours rather than boiling sugar and cream etc for which you need a candy thermometer (which I don't). I boil up around three tins at a time and then keep them in the cupboard for when we need it.We also didn't happen to have any mascarpone in the fridge so I left that out too.
I think it is cake time.
Individual Banana Cakes with Caramel and Vanilla Bean Cream Cheese Icing
Adapted from Treats from and Little and Friday
Makes 8
125g butter, softened
3/4 cup caster sugar
2 large eggs
5 very ripe bananas, mashed
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
4 tablespoons hot milk
Cream cheese icing:
30g butter, softened
50g cream cheese
3 cups icing sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla bean paste (or one teaspoon vanilla essence)
Preheat the oven to 160 degrees on bake. Line a texas sized muffin tin with baking paper. Cut a circle for the bottom then a long strip around 25cm long and 10cm wide and place that around the edges of the tins. Make sure the strip is long enough to overlap at the ends when in the tin. It will stand up in a tall cylinder but as you place the cake batter into it it will stretch out and line the edges of the tin exactly.
Cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in the eggs one at a time then continue to beat until fluffy and voluminous.
Beat in the mashed banana.
Dissolve the baking soda in the hot milk.
Gently fold in the milk and sieved flour and baking soda in three equal lots.
Divide the mixture evenly between the tins. If you want really tall cakes then you may only get 6 but the shorter ones may be better if you or your guests aren't very good at tackling huge quantities of sickly sweet food.
Bake for 25-30 minutes or until a skewer comes out clean. Leave to cool before removing from tins and removing baking paper.
To make the cream cheese icing, cream together all the ingredients until light and fluffy.
To assemble the cakes, cut the cakes in half horizontally. You may need to level the tops of the cakes if they have domed substantially. Spread around two teaspoons of caramel over the base of the cakes then follow with a good dollop of the cream cheese icing. To the top layers, spread over the cream cheese icing followed by a small drop of caramel. Place the top halves onto their matching bottoms. Garnish with a slice or two of banana or some banana chips if you wish.
Enjoy! :)
They bought it.
Yuss another baking escapade completed without too much parental hate. Having me in the house is like living in a bakery. You get chubs. There is always cake or something delicious around to munch on. I think they enjoy it when I leave. Wait, there is no 'I think' about it. I know they love to see me hop on that plane to Dunedin where they don't have to see/live with me for months at a time.
Anyway Jack and his friend Will (Hi Will!) were going to the gym together and they needed post gym nutrition. I don't know where they got the idea that banana cake was a good option for post exercise sustenance but regardless, I was going to be the source of this cake.
Ever since receiving my Treats from Little and Friday book for Christmas I have been wanting to try something out.
The problem with this book, whilst it looks beautiful, all the recipes have hideous quantities of ingredients and last time I checked I didn't have my body weight of eggs and chocolate lying around the house. The same with the ground nuts that are required for a few of the cakes. Seriously, who can afford 4 cups of ground hazelnuts for a spot of afternoon treat baking?
The one small cake recipe that wasn't atrociously expensive to make was the mini banana cakes. They used the recipe from the Edmonds cookbook but frilled it up with a few lashing and dashings of cream cheese icing, mascarpone and caramel.
It said it would make 12 small texan muffin pan sized cakes.
Negative.
It said to use a texas muffin tin that had the sides lined up with baking paper so that the cakes could be made quite tall. I ended up making 6 smallish texas sized ones (I didn't know how far to fill them so a erred on the side of caution) and used some of the left over batter to make 3 small baby bundt ones. The batter definitely wouldn't have made 12 large ones. Awkward.
The next weridity was the amount of mashed banana the recipe required. Your standard banana cake recipe calls for around about 3 ripe bananas.
Haha but not this one.
It called for three CUPS of mashed banana. I mashed up four bananas and that only achieved one and a half cups. Who has eight bananas lying around for SIX wee cakes. I am hoping it was a typo. I only added four bananas worth. You could probably increase this to five bananas and that would make it quite moist but also a wee bit on the dense side.
I don't know about you but I am all into simple methods. Methods that are minimalist on the word front because seriously who can be bothered reading methods when there is cake to be had! The method for these had a crazy number of steps (one of which was to sift the flour into a separate bowl - uuuh extra dishes anyone?). So here I am going to condense all these steps into a more manageable and easy to read format.
The caramel I used was from a tin of condensed milk that I had boiled away (in the sealed tin!) for three hours rather than boiling sugar and cream etc for which you need a candy thermometer (which I don't). I boil up around three tins at a time and then keep them in the cupboard for when we need it.We also didn't happen to have any mascarpone in the fridge so I left that out too.
I think it is cake time.
Individual Banana Cakes with Caramel and Vanilla Bean Cream Cheese Icing
Adapted from Treats from and Little and Friday
Makes 8
125g butter, softened
3/4 cup caster sugar
2 large eggs
5 very ripe bananas, mashed
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
4 tablespoons hot milk
Cream cheese icing:
30g butter, softened
50g cream cheese
3 cups icing sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla bean paste (or one teaspoon vanilla essence)
Preheat the oven to 160 degrees on bake. Line a texas sized muffin tin with baking paper. Cut a circle for the bottom then a long strip around 25cm long and 10cm wide and place that around the edges of the tins. Make sure the strip is long enough to overlap at the ends when in the tin. It will stand up in a tall cylinder but as you place the cake batter into it it will stretch out and line the edges of the tin exactly.
Cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in the eggs one at a time then continue to beat until fluffy and voluminous.
Beat in the mashed banana.
Dissolve the baking soda in the hot milk.
Gently fold in the milk and sieved flour and baking soda in three equal lots.
Divide the mixture evenly between the tins. If you want really tall cakes then you may only get 6 but the shorter ones may be better if you or your guests aren't very good at tackling huge quantities of sickly sweet food.
Bake for 25-30 minutes or until a skewer comes out clean. Leave to cool before removing from tins and removing baking paper.
To make the cream cheese icing, cream together all the ingredients until light and fluffy.
To assemble the cakes, cut the cakes in half horizontally. You may need to level the tops of the cakes if they have domed substantially. Spread around two teaspoons of caramel over the base of the cakes then follow with a good dollop of the cream cheese icing. To the top layers, spread over the cream cheese icing followed by a small drop of caramel. Place the top halves onto their matching bottoms. Garnish with a slice or two of banana or some banana chips if you wish.
Enjoy! :)