Saturday, June 5, 2010

Best Ever Banana Cake Not

This recipe from RecipeZaar has about 750 reviews.. and you would have thought that with 750 excellent reviews, there is no way the cake would turn out anything less than fabulous.

But as the way things often go.. my banana cake didn't turn out fantastic.

The recipe was simple and everything went well. The mixture looked really good before I sent it into the oven.. But even then, I had my qualms... I had used a smaller cake pan than what the recipe suggested.. and my cake was just too tall.

Looking pretty before the oven

The baking temperature of this cake was really low (140 deg C).. hence the long baking time (1 hour 10 minutes according to most of the reviews..) suggested in the recipe. I think the low temperature was to allow the sugars in the banana to slowly caramelize. Leaving the cake soft and moist, with a caramelised side.

My cake tasted pretty alright.. but because it was so tall.. It took me 2 hours to get it cooked.. and even then it was still a little teeny bit under-cooked in the centre. And I really shouldn't have put the banana slices on top of the cake. Most of them sank right through during baking, resulting in a pretty lopsided and less-than-pretty cake.


 How the cake looked like after baking for about 2 hours.. 
It's the first time I've baked a cake for that long..

Fortunately the taste was still pretty good. 
Not the "Best Ever" banana cake.. 
but a pretty decent one. And everything banana 
goes well with a glass of cold milk.

4 comments:

365days2play said...

Hi, I believe I tried this banana cake recipe before! The 1st two times were a disaster. My cake was too dense and yes it took forever to bake! From the recipe ingredients, it seems that there isn't enough rising agents, and they also don't call for whipped egg whites, which is very strange. But if you managed to get a tall cake, then probably I did something wrong....

Open Kitchen Concept said...

hi there! For me the cake rose a bit.. but it was really my bad that I used a long and narrow can pan instead of a 9 by 13 inches cake pan they mentioned. Actually, the creaming of the butter (incorporates air), the buttermilk and baking soda contributes to the rising agents.. but yeah.. it took forever to bake. I'm thinking whether to retry this recipe..

Open Kitchen Concept said...

Oh yes.. by the way, I very much prefer this banana cake recipe.. It was tried and tested by me and Petunia.. and both of us had good results from it..

http://openkitchenconcept.blogspot.com/2009/06/almost-perfect-banana-cake.html

365days2play said...

Thanks for the new recipe. I have some left over bananas so I probably will try it soon! But this time, I will halve the recipe just in case.