Banana Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting

As promised, here's the recipe Banana Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting

This was all I could muster with Quinn's 2.0 megapixel camera, because the digital camera is with my dad who won't be back til tomorrow night, but it looks, nonetheless, delightful.

Banana Cake

Ingredients

125 g unsalted butter, softened

115 g granulated sugar

2 eggs, lightly beaten

1 tsp vanilla extract

4 ripe bananas, mashed

1 tsp baking soda

1 1/2 tsp baking powder

125 mL milk

250g All-Purpose flour

1/2 tsp ground cinnamon

1. Preheat oven: 180oC (350oF) and lightly grease an 8" square tin.
2. Cream butter and sugar together until light and creamy.
3. Add the egg gradualy, beating thoroughly after each addition.
4. Add the vanilla and banana and beat until combined.
   
   Set aside
   
   
5. Sift the flour together with the baking powder and ground cinnamon.
6. Dissolve the baking soda in the milk.
7. Fold the flour mixture alternately with the milk into the banana mixture.
8. Stir until all ingredients are combined.
   
   Spoon into tin and smooth surface. Bake for 45 mins to an hour, or until a cake skewer comes out clean. Leave in cake tin for 10 minutes before turning out onto a wire rack to cool.

My best friends bake too, but the difference with me is I can never forget to 'mise en place' because I've made mistakes before and ingredients don't come cheap so everytime before I bake, the ingredients are not only measured, but placed in the order they are added - from left to right.

Although the creaming method is just about the most time-consuming cake-mixing method, I like it. I leave out the butter for about an hour and it softens enough to cream even without an electric beater. I end up getting one hell of an arm workout though.

Eggs, love 'em, hate 'em, need 'em. Eggs can disappear in my house like "Poof!". Being me, I don't just bake simply for the joy of it. I research on why I gotta do this, why I gotta do that and what-not, and I've learned that adding eggs gradually to the batter helps to incorporate the eggs into the batter better. A strike of realization hit me, because I used to always complain why the batter looked so soggy when I first started. Meanwhile, I have yet to master cracking eggs with one hand - I still do it with a fork and split the shell with both hands.

On to the milk, I rarely use milk, primarily because my mother complains that her stomach hurts when she drinks milk. Then I accuse her of being lactose intolerant, while my brother wonders why she doesn't get stomach aches when she eats ice cream, "Ice cream has milk, doesn't it?" he says. This recipe calls for dissolving baking soda in milk, so my scientific mind starts to race, "What the heck happens when you add sodium bi-carbonate to lactose?" I thought. So I researched on it and found out that baking soda prevents milk from going bad - plus about 75 other uses for baking soda. Whaddup!

For the addition of flour and milk, I like beginning with flour and ending with flour.

Cream Cheese Frosting

Ingredients

60g unsalted butter, softened
125g cream cheese, softened
185g icing sugar
1-2 tsp lemon juice

1. Beat butter and cream cheese together using electric beaters until smooth.
2. Gradually add the icing sugar alternately with the lemon juice.
3. Beat until think and creamy.

This was a first for me. A few years ago I was ready to give up because I couldn't make icing. It was runny, extremely sweet and rather unappetizing, but when I tasted this is was simply heavenly. Cream cheese frosting is FOOLPROOF! So, ice as you please.

Meanwhile, I shall go appreciate a few slices to try mending my now shattered heart, while I worry about the Messers.

- Messer Girl