Episode 41
March 13, 2011
Banana Bundt Cake
If you’re a fan of banana bread then I know you’ll love this tender, moist cake. Unlike banana bread, my banana cake doesn’t have any nuts added to it – but you can add up to a cup of nuts easily by folding them in at the end. The great thing about this recipe is that it’s easy to make and, if you make it in bundt form, is effortless to decorate.
I’ve had this recipe for a long time – all the way back in high school. It came from the same cookbook as the carrot cake and I think the devil’s food chocolate cake – the New Cookbook by Better Homes and Gardens. Of course by then it wasn’t really new as so much from the late 80′s and early 90′s. Either way, the recipes worked – with some minor tweaking here and there as well as the conversion to weights. Anyway, I used to make this cake all the time when I worked at Banana Republic, though I’m not sure if I picked this recipe because of the banana in it or not. Regardless this cake was always a hit, and the more I made it the better it got. For one, I stopped using unflavored shortening. In the video I say, “Unflavored shortening has the flavor of… nothing! It sucks all flavor away.” I really do feel like that’s the case in this recipe. The first few batches of this cake I made in high school I used plain shortening and I always found that to be the case. That’s why I stick with butter flavored shortening so at least it has a butter flavor. You can substitute equal parts butter if you’d like, but your cake may not be as leavened or moist as if you had used shortening.
As I say in the video, this recipe calls for buttermilk. I found when I was living in Rhode Island, that in the North buttermilk was a seasonal product. It was only available in the winter starting a while right before Christmas. If you can’t find buttermilk don’t fret. You can use an equal amount of yogurt (for every ounce of buttermilk, substitute an ounce of yogurt). You can also make sour milk by adding a tablespoon of acid (lemon juice, vinegar) to every 8 ounces of whole milk – then let it sit for 5 minutes. I usually used the latter of the two substitutions because I never really had yogurt lying around the fridge.
The glaze was a bit tricky this time around. When I was in high school, my mother didn’t have a kitchen aid mixer – just the sunbeam. So whenever I tried to make icing, it always came out soupy. Now whether that was the mixer’s fault or my lack of experience I’ll never know for sure but sure enough this time around the icing came out fluffy and ready for icing a cake. Of course, I wanted a glaze so I just added two more ounces of milk (6 ounces in total) which ended up causing the icing to break a little. I tried to heat the glaze up using a creme brulee torch but it was too far gone – too much liquid for the eggs to absorb or too much too fast. In addition, the glaze recipe made a lot more icing than I remember it making so for the recipe you can download I’ve reduced the recipe by a third.
Oh, and of course when I try to grease and flour a pan on camera it gets a little messy. Whenever you work in a commercial kitchen, pan release is your best friend. You spray that stuff on like there’s no tomorrow. Well evidently at home you can’t really use the same zeal – or maybe my bundt pan was just extra non-stick? Either case the pan release mostly pooled at the bottom soaking the flour I had sprinkled on top. This is what caused that strange discoloration on the top of my bundt cake. If I were to do it again I’d still grease and flour my bundt pan, but I’d probably either go easy on the grease or wipe it around with a paper towel.
This cake is also great for a breakfast treat, so feel free to have cake first thing in the morning this time around! Here’s the recipe for banana bundt cake which also makes two 9″ round cakes and also included is the glaze. Enjoy the video below! Thanks for watching!
