Banana Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting

This is the best ever banana cake.  It is so moist and has a lot of banana flavour, made even better by adding cream cheese frosting.  It is dangerous for me to have this cake in the house because I cannot pass it without cutting off a little bite.  I also like to keep this one in the fridge, I like it better cold. You can use the frosting or if you prefer more of a snacking cake for breakfast mid-morning snack, it is also very good with out the frosting.

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1/2 cup butter, softened

1 & 1/2 cups sugar

2 eggs

1 cup sour cream

1 tsp vanilla

2 cups four

1 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp salt

2 medium bananas, mashed (1 cup)

Cream butter and sugar, add eggs and mix to incorporate

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Add in sour cream and vanilla, mix

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Combine flour baking soda and salt, gradually add this to the creamed mixtureIMG_3870

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Mix until combine into a batter

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Add in the banana and mix until combined

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Pour batter into a 9″X13″and bake.

TO prepare the cream cheese frosting:

Take 1 block of cream cheese at room temperature, 1/2 cup butter, at room temperature, 2 tsp vanilla and about 3 cups icing sugar.  Mix until combined and creamy smooth.  I usually add 2 cups of the icing sugar and them keep adding until it is as sweet as I want it.

Well I got carried away and didn’t take a picture before frosting!

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Guinness Chocolate Cake…a.k.a Best Cake Ever

We all LOVE LOVE LOVE this cake. I make this at least a few times a year.  This is another Nigella recipe (from her book Feast) and it is my favourite.  It is a delicious dense dark moist chocolate cake topped with a very creamy smooth cream cheese icing.

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Preheat your oven to 180C, which I think is 350F.  Start with a can of Guinness.  This is what happens if you are unprepared when you open it and don’t have a pot ready to pour it in. I lost a little bit.

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Pour the can of Guinness (250ml) into a pot and add butter (250g) heat until melted.  I just realized, while typing this, that I just poured in the whole can. I think that was quite a bit more than I needed.  Which explains why the batter was wetter than I remembered it being and it took longer to bake.  But it turned out amazing!

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Add sugar (400g) and cocoa powder (75g)

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Whisk this together while heating

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Take that off the stove and let cool a couple of minutes, in a separate bowl whisk together 142ml sour cream, 2 eggs and 1Tbsp vanilla

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Pour that mixture into the chocolatey beer mixture.

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To that add 275g of flour and 2&1/2 tsp baking soda

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Pour batter into prepared (greased with a round of parchment lining the bottom) springform pan (8 or 9″)

Place the pan on a cookie sheet, just in case of leakage.

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Bake for about 45-60 minutes until done. Don’t worry about the cracks in the top, those nooks and crannies will get filled with the delicious cream cheese icing.

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Let cool completely before icing.  Once the cake was at room temperature I wrapped in plastic wrap and placed in the refrigerator overnight and did the icing the next day.

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The cream cheese icing is amazing but very simple.  Beat together 300g room temperature cream cheese with 150g icing sugar and 125ml whipping cream.  I used a little less that that amount of whipping cream as I found the icing was getting too liquid.  Use your judgement.

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Dollop the icing on top of the cake and spread to the edges.

It kind of looks like a pint of Guinness!

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I think this cake would also be great without the icing or just a sifting of icing sugar.