Cake #24: Banana Cake with Chocolate Frosting

Our elementary school has a carnival fundraiser with a Cake Walk and a cake raffle, so they ask parents to make lots of cakes for it. I thought this would be a good one for the cake raffle, but since it wasn't decorated all fancy, someone got a heck of a tasty Cake Walk prize!

Since I hadn't made this cake before, I decided to double the recipe so that I could give one cake to the carnival and keep the other one to eat at home (we had to know how it tasted, after all!)

     

The bundt style cake (above) looked a bit fancier, so that one went to the carnival. 

The tube style cake (below) we kept at home.

This ended up being a great cake to double the recipe for, especially when you're trying to get rid of bananas in the freezer. I used 7 bananas for the doubled recipe. The book says it "smells like banana bread, but tastes like cake".

I wanted to follow the recipe, so I actually bought sticks of shortening for this one (instead of substituting it for butter like I normally would do). It also called for other things I had to go grocery shopping for: like cake flour, buttermilk and walnuts.

The book called for a frosting made with baking chocolate, vanilla, butter, confectioner's sugar and sweetened condensed milk, but I was also making boxed cheap cakes for the Cake Walk so I just used the store-bought fudge frosting for this.

I had to put toothpicks on top to keep the frosting in tact to transport it to the school. If I did this again, I'd put a little more effort into decorating and I'd be sure to tell them when I drop it off that it's a fancy cake!

I put a note in the book that next time I should make homemade cream cheese frosting for the banana cake, the chocolate frosting was too much- it over-powered the yummy cake flavor. 

Meanwhile, I had fun making designs on my cheap store-bought cakes for the cake walk, trying to make $1 cakes with fudge frosting look fancy: