Recipes Discovered

Banana Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting Recipe

I tried making banana bread a couple weeks ago, but that didn’t work out so well. I had some very ripe bananas that needed to be used though, so I thought I would find another recipe and try again. Since banana cake is one of Seth’s favorites and I found a Paula Dean recipe that got really great reviews, I figured I would try that.

For the cake, I mixed together a lot of flour and sugar along with some baking soda and salt. I didn’t add the cinnamon because that just didn’t seem to go with the bananas in my mind. When the dry ingredients were well mixed, I added beaten eggs and oil. The recipe said to do this by hand, which seemed odd, but that’s what I did. It took awhile to moisten the dry ingredients, but eventually it all come together into a mass of dough. At that point I added mashed bananas and vanilla (I skipped the nuts for this one). >> Again, it takes awhile to get everything mixed, but be patient and it will eventually come together. I used a buttered and floured 9×13 glass dish to bake the cake, so I lowered the baking temperature to 325 degrees. It ended up taking about 50 minutes until the cake was done. I let it cool for 20 minutes, and then inverted it to a parchment lined baking sheet to cool completely.

For the frosting, I beat room temperature cream cheese and butter together until they were creamy and then added powdered sugar and vanilla. I beat the mixture for about 5 minutes until it was fluffy and then spread it over the cooled cake. There was enough icing to cover the top and sides of the cake.

The banana cake turned out so much better than the banana bread, which isn’t saying too much, but the cake was really good. The cake was moist, light, and had a good banana flavor, though the banana flavor could have been a little stronger. The frosting was a little on the sweet side, but I think it paired well with the cake. Inverting the cake worked out really well too. Since I baked the cake in a glass dish, the bottom (which became the top) formed a slightly stiff crust, but it made frosting the cake very easy. Seth even gave the cake a thumbs up, which I guess makes the recipe a keeper.