Recipe: Banana Cake With Cream Cheese Frosting

It was the girlfriend’s birthday and she requested for a banana cake. So I spent an afternoon trying to bake a cake for her. I seriously need to kick my bad habit of doing things the last minute because I started baking after lunch, thinking that I had ample time to complete. But as usual, it ended up in a mad rush with me late for the birthday dinner and hair was still wet because I have no time to blow dry it.

This is considered a successful recipe, I think. The thing about me is, I like to play with different recipes every time. I may be baking banana cakes for many times but every time, I would go online to look for a new recipe and tweak it according to my preference.

I was seriously not sure if I would succeed making this cake because it requires me to bake at such a low temperature (140°C). But well, it turned out perfectly okay, except that it took abit loooooonger to get it done. The baking time may vary based on individual ovens. It was stated 1 hour but my freaking old oven took me about 1 hour 20 minutes.

Oh one another unique point of this recipe is, it requires me to freeze my cake after baking. I don’t know what does the freezing does to the cake, probably it makes the cake more moist or probably the recipe creator was also in a hurry just like me. LOL. Whatever it is, enjoy baking!

Ingredients (9 inch pan)
Adapted from here

1 1/2 cups riped bananas, mashed
2 teaspoons lemon juice
3 cups flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup butter, softened
2 cups sugar
3 large eggs
1/2 teaspoons vanilla essence
1 1/2 cups buttermilk

Frosting
1/2 cup butter, softened
230g cream cheese, softened
1/8 teaspoon vanilla essence
3 1/2 cups icing sugar

Garnish
chopped walnuts

Method
1. Preheat oven to 140°C.
2. Grease and flour the pan.
3. In a small bowl, mix mashed banana with the lemon juice; set aside.
4. In a medium bowl, mix flour, baking soda and salt; set aside.
5. Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy.
6. Beat in eggs, one at a time, then stir in vanilla essence.
7. Beat in the flour mixture alternately with the buttermilk.
8. Stir in banana mixture.
9. Pour batter into prepared pan and bake in preheated oven for about one hour or until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean.
10. Remove from oven and place directly into the freezer for 1 hour.

Frosting
1. Cream the butter and cream cheese until smooth.
2. Beat in vanilla essence.
3. Add icing sugar and beat on low speed until combined, then on high speed until frosting is smooth.
4. Spread on cooled cake. Sprinkle chopped walnuts if desired.

The girlfriends love it! I don’t know if they were just entertaining me or what. But I enjoyed my cake too. I wish I had more time to chill the cake though. By the way, I didn’t wanted such a thick layer of frosting on my cake one, but well, I am really bad at frosting. I just wanted to do a smooth plain surface but I can’t seem to get it done beautifully. So I decided to cover the ugly parts with rose frosting so that it didn’t look that bad, but aiya my rose design didn’t look like rose at all. So I sprinkled some chocolate to cover the mess. LOL! Beautiful mess lah, hor? Time to learn to do proper frosting soon!

Have a great Sunday! <3