Week 3: Banana Cake with German Icing

For week 3 of Cakes 1, we made Banana Layer Cake with a German Icing.  Not sure I can call it a layer cake since I didn't really layer it...I guess I could've torted the cake and placed the icing in the middle, but I thought this looked nicer.

This cake was fairly light but the instructor recommended not layering 2 banana cakes together as it would become too heavy.  She said if you wanted a taller or layered cake, to sandwich this cake between two layers of chocolate cake or vice versa.  I think I might try that next time I use this recipe.

The recipe for this cake is similar to the carrot cake from week 2, in that it doesn't have any traditional fat, like butter or oil.  The fat used for the carrot cake was eggs and here we used eggs and shortening.  I usually start cakes by creaming butter and sugar together, but here we creamed shortening and flour first, which is interesting because I always thought to add the flour last to make sure it wasn't over mixed.  Although the flour was mixed quite a bit here, I found the cake to be light and fluffy and not tough as you'd expect when over mixing flour...I guess this is a result of add
shortening.

The German icing was a nice complement to this cake.  It's a cooked icing which contains milk, egg yolks, butter, sugar, vanilla, coconut and walnuts.  I think traditional German icing contains pecans, but the walnuts work well also.

The assembly of the cake was quite rustic, I simply spread the German icing on the top of the cake with the back of a spoon. 


Here's a fun fact: contrary to popular belief, German icing, often used on German chocolate cake, did not actually originate in Germany but from an American chocolate maker named Sam German!




Overall, I'm not sure if I'm completely sold on a butterless banana cake, but it was definitely yummy enough to make again :)