From Fermenting To Finance

And family! Life hacks I wish I knew sooner that might just help you.

I began making hordes of banana bread the year I was ravenously hungry while breastfeeding my daughter. I became so obsessed, I soon became inspired to make a cake using my favorite chocolate banana bread recipe.

This cake consists of two batches of banana bread. Each banana bread batch was split between two 9” round cake pans for a total of 4 cake layers. Be sure to line your cake pans with parchment paper for easy clean up and to freeze the cake layers until you’re ready to apply icing. I always bake my cakes ahead of time and freeze in plastic freezer bags using the parchment paper to stack the cakes. Sometimes weeks ahead! This gives me time to focus on decorating the day before the event.

Merengue Crème Frosting

Most banana cake recipes will suggest a cream cheese frosting. I wanted something different that didn’t remind me of a carrot cake. This icing is much lighter, yet still holds its shape.

Ingredients:

  • 6 egg whites
  • ¾ cup of raw granulated sugar
  • 1 quart of heavy whipping cream
  • 2-3 tablespoons of vanilla extract
  • ¾ cup of powdered sugar (or more to taste)

For the icing, I wanted something rich, but not too sweet: a balance of savory yet fatty and decadent. Being banana bread, I wanted this cake to be worthy of eating even for breakfast.

I’d never come across a recipe for combining whipped cream and egg whites, but I figured there had to be a way. Merging the richness of whipped cream with the stiff structure of merengue seemed like the perfect solution to keep a heavy cake layer in place and avoid the dreaded melting of whipped cream that’s devastated other cakes I’ve made.

Low and behold, while I still have yet to find an official recipe (let me know if you have one!), I came across a subreddit that suggested the following:

6 egg whites cooked over steam with 3/4 cup of raw sugar, the whipped in mixer. Glass bowl is from my stand mixer
Once egg whites are whipped, I placed them in a bowl (right) and chilled the merengue in the fridge while I made standard whip cream (left). Once the whipped cream was finished with vanilla and powdered sugar, I folded the two mixtures together with a plastic spatula. Voila!

Assembling the Cake

The banana bread is coated in icing while still cold after thawing from freezer for about 2 hours.

In total, I used four layers. Parchment paper separates the layers in the freezer bags.
I began layering in thick layers.
Four cake layers used up all the icing!

Extra credit decoration ideas:

For decor I made a checker/chess board. Board pieces are made from chocolate molds and dehydrated bananas. The checkerboard consists of dusted cocoa powder made fro
masks of parchment paper strips.

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