Bananas About Birthday Cake!

So last post I bragged talked about the red velvet cake I made for hubby's birthday.  Today I'll show you the banana cake I made for Little Bear's first birthday.  I really wanted to do a kid friendly cake.  Yes, that would possibly be any cake.. but I really wanted something sweet and moist and fun.  I read somewhere/everywhere that adding a box of pudding to cake mix makes it extra moist, so I knew I was going to do that.  I wanted to make a cake from scratch, but I didn't want to overwhelm myself since I was already making a scratch cake for hubby the same day.  I decided to just remix a boxed cake mix instead.  But what flavor... hmmm.  I love carrot cake, but like I said before I've made it soooo many times. I didn't want to do chocolate since we were already having red velvet.  The idea came when my husband mentioned something about eating one of the brown bananas in the pantry. Hmmm, I thought, what about banana cake? Perfect... Little Bear loves bananas.  Then I decided to add a filling like the professionals. In my research I stumbled onto a baking forum (can't remember which) and it was suggested to replace milk for heavy cream when making instant pudding for a great filling. Just in case you wanted to know... heavy cream + instant banana pudding = heaven.

So here it is... Banana Cake with Banana Filling and Vanilla Butter Cream... Enjoy!

For the cake:

To make the cake I simply added one really ripe banana (squished up of course) and a box of banana flavored instant pudding to the regular cake, plus anything else the box called for.  I used Funfetti cake mix... but you could use yellow or white too.

I made regular vanilla butter cream frosting (I'm thinking a could have added a box of banana pudding to that too, to give it banana flavor... but that may have been too much)  I will never use a canned frosting again after tasting real butter cream.  It just doesn't compare.

For the frosting:

• 1 cup unsalted butter (2 sticks or 1/2 pound), softened 

• 4-5 cups confectioners (powdered) sugar

• 1/4 teaspoon table salt

• 1 tablespoon vanilla extract

• up to 4 tablespoons  heavy cream

I start by beating the butter till it's creamy, then I sift in the confectioners sugar little by little.  I don't have a stand alone so this can be a tedious process (if your reading this hubby... hint hint; ) After everything is all incorporated and smooth add your vanilla and salt.  Last add the heavy cream.  Some recipes call for milk... but I just think if your going for butter CREAM... you should use cream.  LOL... keep tasting until you get it exactly right.  I do this a lot.  The original recipe came from here but I added more sugar. I also use her chocolate ganache recipe... yum!

For the filling:

• 1 box of instant pudding
• 2 cups of heavy cream
• Mix until thick and smooth
• Taste... visit heaven.

 I ended up using two boxes of cake.  3 nine inch cake rounds, and 1 six inch round.  I only made one of the cakes banana, you couldn't tell once it was all assemble because the filling had such a great banana flavor.

After cooling completely.  I stacked my layers be sure to shave off the rounded tops of the cake so you have a level surface.   So the bottom part has three layers with banana cream filling between.  After stacking, I gave it a crumb coat. I needed to have a really smoothing frosting job because I was using fondant.  This is actually a picture of the Red Velvet cake with a crumb coat... totally forgot to take pics while I was doing this one.

I made a big batch of marshmallow fondant, you can read this post to find out how. After coloring and rolling it out (which took longer than I care to admit... I almost threw it all out and said F-it) I carefully laid it over the top and around the sides.. And still made lumps, bumps, and wrinkles. I wasn't too worried about the poor covering job because I knew I could hide a lot of the oopsies with decoration... And I did.  Two tiers wasn't too bad... I ended up using the top tier for his smash cake.  I just lifted the whole thing off when it was time.  It left a little ring on the bottom part... but honestly.. who cares?

So that's it... It's not at all what I was planning on doing. Sorry I didn't get more pics... I was on a cake mission almost impossible by that time.  I had originally wanted to do some kind of jungle cake with animals on top. As you can see it's a long way from that... I think it looks like a spaceship actually. Anyway, no matter what it looked like, it was moist, creamy, and down right delish! Of course the most important thing was that Little Bear loved it... And so did everyone else.