More stress baking!
There was a presentation coming up in a week and I was NOT prepared soooooo... I baked a giant cake?
The result of a serious commitment to procrastination.
See that? The mummified peel had reached a blue-black hue. Mmmm.
smooth iced the stacked layers with vanilla buttercream (the other buttercream portion mixed with vanilla bean paste and a couple teaspoons of vanilla extract),
and then stacked and decorated the tiers with piped caramel buttercream!
It was a simple design pumped out in a timely (read: frantic) fashion, but it came out well! Clean, balanced, and I'll be damned, I can still pipe a fairly even shell border after all this time (I think it's been over a year since I piped a shell border; SAD).
A vanity shot from above:
Yep, it came out pretty well, although I got a little hung up after not being able to get the vanilla buttercream quite as smooth as I would've liked. I was left with some seams and gaps, but after
a little reflection (and once the Diet Shasta Cola caffeine wore off) I could convince myself to appreciate the elegance of the small moments of irregularity in my work's vanilla bean-flecked façade.
Moment of Elegant Irregularity I
Moment of Elegant Irregularity II
I love that our resident wizard Anne Ch'ien has beautiful flowers put on our
mezzanine every week; they make for some pretty awesome cake pictures.
Aaaaand the inside!
And a slice my friends saved for me that I took home after library time. Note the unintentional ombre color gradient in the cake itself:
Cool.
Now on to the recipe!
This cake has a pleasant banana flavor, present but not overbearing. It's an excellent foil for a strong, dark caramel buttercream! The cake is fairly firm, which makes it easier to cut into (relatively =P) neat thin layers.
Banana Cake
4 cups all-purpose flour
2 cups + 4 tablespoons cake flour
6 tablespoons buttermilk powder
3 teaspoons baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
4 eggs
3 egg yolks
1 cup vegetable oil
1 cup white sugar
1 cup (packed) dark brown sugar
3 very ripe bananas, puréed
1 1/2 cups water
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
Set oven to 350°.
Grease, line and flour a seven and an eight inch pan (one each if you have three-inch-deep pans, but two each if you're using shallower ones).
Whisk the dry ingredients together in a large bowl. Set aside.
In another large bowl, whisk the eggs and yolks together with the oil, and then add the two types of sugar, the puréed bananas, the water, and the vanilla. Fold the dry into the wet in several additions.
Divide the batter among the cake pans until each is 3/4 full. Bake until an inserted knife comes out clean (for the 3 inch deep pans, this will take over an hour).
This cake rose beautifully. Do yourself a solid and cut the crust from the top of the cake straight out of the oven and eat it. So. Good. Use the cake within a couple (2!!) days, because the scraps I had left over got stale super fast.
Happy baking!
Azara
There was a presentation coming up in a week and I was NOT prepared soooooo... I baked a giant cake?
The result of a serious commitment to procrastination.
The construction of this cake was the result not only of a strong desire not to confront months of readings but also a few super, super old bananas.
See that? The mummified peel had reached a blue-black hue. Mmmm.
I'd had them in the fridge for months and was getting ready to pitch those bad boys in the trash, but I thought, hey, why not take a peek under the peel and see if they merit salvaging? Honestly I thought they'd've been reduced to semi-liquified banana alcohol or totally ruined by mold, but to my surprise they were perfectly banana-bread-ripe.
So I baked myself some banana cake (recipe at the end of the post) and leveled the top,
carved nine layers for the top tier and nine for the bottom, soaked them in a brown sugar simple syrup and layered them with a caramel Italian meringue buttercream (recipe here, but with the coffee omitted and the buttercream divided into two halves, one of the portions then mixed with a full batch of caramel from this blog post),
So I baked myself some banana cake (recipe at the end of the post) and leveled the top,
carved nine layers for the top tier and nine for the bottom, soaked them in a brown sugar simple syrup and layered them with a caramel Italian meringue buttercream (recipe here, but with the coffee omitted and the buttercream divided into two halves, one of the portions then mixed with a full batch of caramel from this blog post),
smooth iced the stacked layers with vanilla buttercream (the other buttercream portion mixed with vanilla bean paste and a couple teaspoons of vanilla extract),
and then stacked and decorated the tiers with piped caramel buttercream!
It was a simple design pumped out in a timely (read: frantic) fashion, but it came out well! Clean, balanced, and I'll be damned, I can still pipe a fairly even shell border after all this time (I think it's been over a year since I piped a shell border; SAD).
A vanity shot from above:
Yep, it came out pretty well, although I got a little hung up after not being able to get the vanilla buttercream quite as smooth as I would've liked. I was left with some seams and gaps, but after
a little reflection (and once the Diet Shasta Cola caffeine wore off) I could convince myself to appreciate the elegance of the small moments of irregularity in my work's vanilla bean-flecked façade.
Moment of Elegant Irregularity I
Moment of Elegant Irregularity II
I hauled the finished cake out to Haskell Hall and left it to be picked over by the circling grad students... Well actually, I joined fray this time and grabbed a bite with some of my lovely peers before running off to the liberry. It was a pretty fantastic afternoon snack/hangout =)
I love that our resident wizard Anne Ch'ien has beautiful flowers put on ourmezzanine every week; they make for some pretty awesome cake pictures.
Aaaaand the inside!
And a slice my friends saved for me that I took home after library time. Note the unintentional ombre color gradient in the cake itself:
Cool.
Now on to the recipe!
This cake has a pleasant banana flavor, present but not overbearing. It's an excellent foil for a strong, dark caramel buttercream! The cake is fairly firm, which makes it easier to cut into (relatively =P) neat thin layers.
Banana Cake
4 cups all-purpose flour
2 cups + 4 tablespoons cake flour
6 tablespoons buttermilk powder
3 teaspoons baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
4 eggs
3 egg yolks
1 cup vegetable oil
1 cup white sugar
1 cup (packed) dark brown sugar
3 very ripe bananas, puréed
1 1/2 cups water
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
Set oven to 350°.
Grease, line and flour a seven and an eight inch pan (one each if you have three-inch-deep pans, but two each if you're using shallower ones).
Whisk the dry ingredients together in a large bowl. Set aside.
In another large bowl, whisk the eggs and yolks together with the oil, and then add the two types of sugar, the puréed bananas, the water, and the vanilla. Fold the dry into the wet in several additions.
Divide the batter among the cake pans until each is 3/4 full. Bake until an inserted knife comes out clean (for the 3 inch deep pans, this will take over an hour).
This cake rose beautifully. Do yourself a solid and cut the crust from the top of the cake straight out of the oven and eat it. So. Good. Use the cake within a couple (2!!) days, because the scraps I had left over got stale super fast.
Happy baking!
Azara
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