Turning Yet Another Famous Pie into Cake

Ok, I love Love LOVE experimentation while I'm baking and one of my favourite things to experiment with has to be birthday cakes. Typically I ask the person who's birthday it is what their top 5 favourite desserts are, their 5 favourite chocolate bars, favourite fruit,nuts and colour. Most of these questions are throw away, and have them thinking all kinds of crazy things are going on *insert maniacal laughter and cat*


I always have the most fun with the favourite desserts answers which have resulted in previous experiments involving Chocolate Brownie Chocolate Cheesecake (recipe soon to come) and Lemon Meringue Pie Cupcakes (also, soon to come). This one was a challenge as it was a 1930's theme party. I toyed with the idea of a white cake decorated as a 1930's hatbox complete with fondant hat. Then I remembered I'm quite useless with fondant. But the final end to that idea came when the birthday girl listed her favourite desserts and Banoffee Pie was there. It was going to happen, I had to make it happen, and so I did :P


Banana cake, Sandwiched with caramel and caramel buttercream frosting and apparently it tasted as good as the real thing. I did cheat a little and used store bought Dulce de Leche, home made caramel will come next.


Banana Cake
Makes 2 10" / 3 9" rounds

• 180g butter, softened
• 360g packed light brown sugar
• 3 eggs
• 4 medium bananas, mashed
• 1.5 tsps vanilla extract
• 360g flour
• 3tsps baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 250mls buttermilk

Preheat the oven to 180 C

Line/grease and line 2 10" or 3 9" round tins

Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy

Add eggs, beating well after each addition

In a separate bowl, combine dry ingredients

Add to the butter and sugar mixture, alternating with buttermilk

Pour into prepared tins and bake for 25-30 mins 

Cool in the tins for 20 mins then cool completely (for 2 hours) on a wire rack

Caramel Buttercream Frosting

Makes 6 cups (enough to frost and then colour and decorate this cake)

• 750g icing (confectioners) sugar
• 4 tbsp caramel
• 320g butter, softened
• 2 tsps vanilla extract

Whip butter until light and creamy

Add vanilla and sugar and beat until fluffy

Add caramel and mix well

Assembly

For the caramel layer you will need 2 cans of store bought dulce de leche minus the 4tbsp that went into the frosting.

When I went to assemble this cake I suddenly realised (after putting the top layer down) that the thick caramel layer I envisioned for the centre wasn't going to work (it all started to squeeze out the sides). So I had a bit of a think and decided I'd try something. If it worked it worked, if not hey it was gonna be a little messy but still tasty.

I piped a ring of the icing around the edge of the bottom layer and THEN filled it with the caramel and lo and behold I had a slightly thinner caramel centre layer :P. I the covered the outside of the cake in the frosting and coloured the remaining frosting blue and purple and then it was DECORATING TIME :D

Thanks to Evil Shananigans for the picture :)