Me: “I can’t decide whether to make you a banana cake or a chocolate cake for your birthday. You like them both so much!”
Hubby: “Hmmm, yes that’s a hard one. Can I have both?”
Me: “A layer cake! Great idea!”
(Hubby looks confused).
Me: “I’ll make both, then put them on top of each other, sandwiched together with icing!”
(Hubby raises his eyebrows and smiles).
Me: “What kind of icing do you want?”
Hubby: (Zero hesitation) ”Vanilla”.
Me: “OK (boring!). Which cake do you want to be the top layer?”
Hubby: “Chocolate, obviously. Because banana is chocolate’s bitch”.
But in the end he just got a chocolate cake with vanilla icing (with a coconut twist!) because the bananas I bought weren’t ripe enough. They weren’t even ripe enough to eat on top of muesli, let alone flavour a cake as the main ingredient!
As it was a special birthday cake I tweaked one of my usual chocolate cake recipes to make it super rich (375g of chocolate!) and moist with the addition of walnuts and coconut.
It is baked low and slow so that the centre stays fudgey, while the edges go crispy with an almost caramel taste, thanks to a big cup of dark brown sugar in the mix.
It really doesn’t need the sweet creamy icing, but what’s a birthday cake without icing? That’s right, it’s nothing. Feel free to leave the icing off and serve with whipped cream, that would be an awesome combo – but not if it’s a birthday cake. Birthday cakes need icing, OK?!
Oh, I almost forgot. I used a little pressie I received this week to make it – a Push Pan. This little beauty is a loose bottomed cake tin with a unique silicon seal that makes it water tight – no more leakages!
I just love the way you pop the finished cake on a tin from the pantry and push down to release the it. I was amazed that it actually was that simple – see picture above. No bits that stuck and no need to run a knife around the edge at all. I need to try a cheesecake next, you know, just to make sure their claims are true (not because I want to gorge on cheesecake).