Walnut-Banana Cake W/ Buttercream Frosting

I have a  Ziploc bag filled with bananas in the freezer that I know I need to use soon so I decided to make a banana dessert. I didn’t want to make a banana bread so I decided to turn it into a cake. I also found a bag of walnuts from my pantry so I figured I’d add that for some texture. I ended up with this walnut-banana cake with buttercream frosting. It was sinfully delicious.

Kids naturally eat anything sweet but when it comes to cakes, it’s the frosting they go for. After that, they’d walk away from the table. My 2 yr old daughter is no different. Until she had this walnut-banana cake. It was the first cake that she ate from frosting to cake. Usually she would just eat the frosting off of birthday cakes. Not this banana cake. Even before I handed her a fork, she already had a piece of the cake in her mouth.  Every time she had a slice for dessert on the week that we had this cake, the plate was clean. Oh and yes show knows how to say “cake”. Now let’s see if you can figure out how many times I’ve mentioned “cake” in here.

I found a banana cake recipe from All Recipes which I  tinkered with a bit to add a few things of my own. The * are my additions.

INGREDIENTS

• 1 1/4 cups white sugar
• 1/2 cup butter
• 2 eggs, beaten
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/4 cup sour cream
• 1 cup mashed bananas + * 1/2 cup
• 1 1/2 cups cake flour
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• a pinch of nutmeg *
• 1 small bag of walnuts, crushed it a little bit. just smacked it a few times using a bottom of a glass *

DIRECTIONS

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease and flour  *2 round pans.
3. In a large bowl, cream butter and sugar until light. Add eggs and beat well. Dissolve soda in the sour cream and add it to the butter mixture. Beat well. Add the mashed bananas and mix in. Add cake flour, *nutmeg, and mix well. Stir in vanilla extract.
5. * Fold in the walnuts into the mixture. Just use a spatula, start in the middle, scoop halfway to fold in the nuts. Don’t stir it in there, just slowly fold it in.
7. Pour equal batter into 2 round cake pans and bake at 350 degrees F (175 degrees C) for 45 minutes or until done.

Cool the cake completely before frosting.

* BUTTERCREAM Frosting :

• Beat together 2 sticks of butter, 3 cups of confectionary sugar and a tsp of vanilla extract.

Once the cakes are cooled completely the cake rule is to slice off the top of the cake to have an even setting. You can do that if you want but I got lazy so I didn’t. Oops. It was fine. My cake stood still and firm and it was delish .

Place the 1st cake on top of a cake stand, or a plate huge enough to accommodate the size of the cake. Frost the top. Not too thick, not to thin either. Stack the second cake on top. Frost the top, then side of the layered cake, working it all around. If you don’t have a  frosting spreader, a butter knife is just fine.

Just for fun, I shredded dark baking chocolate on this slice. A little fancy dessert garnish .

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