Banana Bread Cake with Strawberry Buttercream

Tomorrow is my grandpa's birthday, and we are all going to log onto Zoom from around the country to celebrate with him. My mom wants to bake a cake for us to have tomorrow, to be there in spirit with him. We also have a bunch of rotting bananas and a container of strawberries. Thus, the banana bread birthday cake idea was born.

Using the recipe I found for banana cake, I preheated my oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit and started on the ingredients. I mixed together the dry ingredients:

3 cups flour

1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp cinnamon

1/2 salt

Setting aside the dry ingredients, I beat together the wet ingredients, adding 1 ingredient at a time to my bowl:

3/4 cup butter

1 cup cane sugar

1/2 cup brown sugar

3 eggs

2 tsp vanilla

3 mashed bananas

I then made the buttermilk (since I didn't have any actual buttermilk on hand):

1 1/2 cups milk (I used soy milk but any milk works) 

1 tbsp lemon juice

You stir together the ingredients and let them sit for 5 minutes. I alternated added the dry ingredients from before and the buttermilk into the wet ones. The batter looked awesome (and tasted just as great).

 

Because I wanted to make a layer cake, and I don't have a cake pan, I used a pie pan, and decided that I would just bake it 2-3 times for the layers. I prepped the pan with strips of parchment paper so that my cake would hopefully come out of it easily (no crumbling--here's hoping!). 

 

The recipe says to bake the cake for 45-50 minutes, but since I was dividing the batter I decided to set a timer for 25 minutes and check in around then. The cake passed the toothpick test after about 30 minutes, so I took it out and placed it on a wire cooling rack to cool.

 

I filled the pan again and popped it back into the oven for 30 minutes for the next layer. After it was all said and done, I got three lovely layers completed.

I moved on to the frosting. I had some strawberries in the fridge that needed to be used up, so I decided to make strawberry buttercream frosting. I started by pureeing a cup of strawberries with my handheld immersion blender.

I then put the puree over medium heat until it was reduced by half. I let it cool completely. After cooling the puree, I started on the buttercream. In addition to the puree, you need:

3 1/2 cup powdered sugar

1 cup butter

1 tsp vanilla extract

I beat the butter first until it was light and fluffy.  Then, I added in 1 cup of the powdered sugar. Next, I added in 2 tbsp of the puree with all of the vanilla extract. At this point, the recipe said to alternate putting in the puree with the powdered sugar a few more times, but I got lazy and just dumped it all in there and beat it up.

 

Then, I started assembling my cake. I was going for that rustic look, with the obvious layers of cake and frosting, unfrosted edges of cake peeking out. I've gotta be honest though, the frosting isn't exactly firm and when I was putting the whole cake together there was some slipping and sliding. I think this also partially comes from the fact that I didn't level out my layers of cake, so each layer has a slight bulge on top that makes it easy for the layer on top to slide around on that frosting! Overall, though, I think that this cake worked out nicely!

 

I added some whole strawberries and edible flowers on top, and I think the whole look pulled together well. Most importantly, the cake was DELICIOUS. I can't believe I even for a second might doubt that banana bread with sweet, creamy strawberry frosting would be anything other than wonderful. I don't even mind the mess of the cake--it'll likely all be eaten by tomorrow anyways!

 

Happy birthday, Grandpa!