My gorgeous niece Maria was one year old on Monday. On Sunday she had her first birthday party at her grandparents house, complete with jelly and ice-cream! As my contribution to the festivities, I offered to make her birthday cake….
Maria absolutely adores bananas, so her mum asked me if it would be possible to make a banana cake. And indeed it was! I didn’t have any banana cake recipes, only banana bread or loaves which didn’t seem very suitable. So I did some searching around on the web and found a recipe from the much loved Edmunds Cookbook of New Zealand. So, for a week my kitchen became home to a very large bunch of bananas ripening to their very blackest and sweetest state.
The cake baked to a very moist and dense consistency, no doubt due to the incredibly large amount of bananas it contained. Happily the banana taste was still really pronounced after baking!! This cake would make a fantastic tea-time cake with just a simple glace icing on top, but it’s also pretty fabulous when filled with buttercream and iced slightly more elaborately.
I’m happy to say that the cake was a huge hit with everyone, especially Maria! She ate up every last bite (unlike the last slice of cake she had, where she smushed it into the carpet) and proclaimed loudly that it was “nana!”
Maria’s Cake
One 20cm hexagonal cake
250g plain buttercream
7tbsp strawberry jam
1kg fondant icing or sugarpaste
ivory, pink & green food colouring pastes
small marzipan figurines to decorate
small sugar flowers
icing sugar or cornflour (to roll out icing on)
25cm hexagonal cake board or round board.
Banana Cake
This makes enough to fill a deep 20cm hexagonal cake tin and leaves a bit left over to go into a 17cm springform for a tiny cook’s perk cake.
250g unsalted butter, softened
350g caster sugar
4 large eggs
4 cups mashed bananas (250ml cups – this worked out to 4 large bananas and 2 small ones)
2 teaspoons bicarbonate of soda
4 tablespoons boiling milk
4 cups plain flour (sorry, forgot to weigh this!)
2 teaspoons baking powder
Preheat oven to 180C/Gas Mark 4. Grease and line tin.
Cream butter and sugar together until light and fluffy. Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Add mashed banana and mix thoroughly. Stir the bicarbonate of soda into the boiling milk and add to the creamed mixture. Sift the flour and baking powder together and fold nto the mixture.
Turn into the cake tin (tins) and bake for approximately 1 hour and 40 minutes until the cake springs back when lightly touched and a skewer through the middle comes out almost clean (the cake will continue to cook whilst it cools).
Leave in tin for 10 minutes before turning out onto a wire rack. The cake will take about 2 hours to cool fully.
NB. You can make a half-recipe and bake for 50 minutes.
Buttercream
125g unsalted butter softened (not too soft though)
250g icing sugar, sifted
2 teaspoons boiling water
Beat the butter until fluffy. Gradually add the icing sugar and beat in the boiling water at the very end. You can leave the buttercream plain or colour and flavour it.
Assembly
Once cake is completely cooled, slice the minimum necessary from the top to achieve a completely flat top. Cut the cake in half horizontally and centre the bottom part on the cake board.
Spread the buttercream over the bottom half evenly. Gently spread 4tbsp of the strawberry jam on top of the buttercream. Place and centre the top of the cake, making sure that all the edges are lined up.
Sieve the remaining jam and brush it evenly over the filled cake. Make sure you cover all of it so that the icing will stick properly.
Colour 700g of the icing ivory using the paste. Roll out and cover the cake, pressing and smoothing firmly to eliminate air bubbles.
Colour approx 100g of the icing green. Roll out thinly into 13cm x 3cm rectangles and cut notches down one side, halfway through the width to make “grassy” strips. Moisten the uncut side with some water and stick it to the base of the cake letting the cut edge fall down so that it looks like grass.
Colour 60g of icing pale pink. Roll out thinly and cut out 12cm x 5mm strips. Gently twist each strip and attach them to the upper corners of the cake (like a swag), using a drop of water as glue. Continue all around the top of the cake.
Roll small pieces of white icing into balls and attach them at the apex of each swag. Again, use water to attach them. These will neatly cover the joins of the pink icing ribbons.
Decorate the top of the cake with your chosen decoration. I used ready-made marzipan teddy bears and sugar flowers. Also, cut inch long strips of green icing and roll them up to make tufts of grass.
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What an absolutely gorgeous cake! It is so festive looking and it sounds like it was as delicious as it was pretty. Maria’s a lucky girl!
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insanely charming cake. i remember everything about my first birthday except the cake; if i had this sweet one, however, i’m sure i’d never forget it. lucky little girl!
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Thank-you Linda! I do wish I’d taken a picture of the cake once it was cut – the banana seeds made for a very speckled crumb! It also cut beautifully, I forgot to mention that.
Wow, Santos! You can remember your first birthday? I can only remember back as far as three, and even then I don’t remember my birthday, just my brother being born a few months later. I’m impressed! Thanks so much for the compliments!
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what a beautiful cake, and for a first birthday…perfect. I have pictures of my first birthday and cake, and I am looking up at the ceiling instead of the cake.
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wow such a lovely birthday cake! awesome! I would love to try this one for my sis birthday next week. But can I request you something… can you please give the weight measurement for the flour? I always fail miserably if cooking using cup measurement… pleaseee…
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Hi Jienie – as I said, I forgot to weigh out the flour when I baked the cake so here are some tips on measuring it in cups. I stir the flour around (whilst still in a bag) with a large spoon to aerate it a little and remove any clumps. Then spoon it lightly into a measuring cup and level off with a knife. Try not to press down with the knife, just swish it over the top. The amount of flour required is for unsifted flour btw.
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Thanks for the tip Angela… Hope my sis will get as nice and as lovely birthday cake as your niece
Oh can’t wait to try…
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Beautiful Nana cake! Love it and I love your new blog layout. Simply fabulous!! I want one like that for my b-day in Nov.
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What a lovely cake, Angela — and your decorating skills have grown quite advanced!
I love the new layout as well…keep up the writing!
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Thanks Nia! Hope you have a lovely birthday in November and that someone surprises you with a cake
Hi Jennifer! Thanks ever so much for the compliment. I quite enjoyed decorating the cake, and I’ve now got a much greater appreciation of how much trouble cake decorating is. It’s jolly stressful work! Hows The Sweetish Chef coming along?
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Wow! I really am impressed! Can you believe the girlies at my work were cooing at the cake?
Can I hire you to do one for my 30th ?
xxx
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Thanks sweetie
I’m still amazed that people were actually cooing over it. Are they broody or something?
Hi Angela,
My friend has asked me to make a christening cake for her sister. I love baking and am thrilled with the request, I’m just getting a bit nervous with the decorating. I don’t think there is anywhere near here where I could get the lovely marzipan teddy bears but is it easy to go wrong with the fondant icing? Also how much in advance can you make this? I was planning for saturday afternoon and the christening is Sunday afternoon?
Cheers,
Sharon
Oh gosh, you can make it much further in advance than that, if you like. You could make the cake itself on Friday night, wrap it in clingfilm and then fill and decorate on the Saturday. The unfilled cake could also be frozen two weeks in advance, triple-wrapped in clingfilm, and defrosted before filling etc.
Some things I’ve learned since making this cake:
* Put buttercream on the bottom half of the cake and jam on the top half. Much easier than trying to spread jam over buttercream.
* If you’re going to make more cakes in the future, then invest in a sugarpaste smoother to get a really neat finish to the edges and sides of the cake.
* When covering the sides of the cake, you need to lift and push upwards at the skirt of sugarpaste which is frilling out around the cake. If you pull down you’ll stretch it too thin and run the risk of tearing it. This video should help: http://www.vimeo.com/298002
* Buy some white Flora or Trex and rub a little over your fingertips when twisting the sugarpaste/fondant into a ribbon.
* Keep whatever sugarpaste you’re not working with wrapped tightly so that it doesn’t dry out. If it does, then knead it with a tiny bit of white Flora/similar.
Good luck! Working with sugarpaste/fondant is really fun and the results can be stunning!