- Hey, I'm John Kanell,
and today on Preppy Kitchen
we're making an easy and delicious banana cake.
So let's get started.
First off, set that oven to 350.
Grab a 9x13 inch baking dish.
And I'm just gonna give it some butter
and a little bit of parchment paper
so everything comes out nice and easy.
I just so happened to have these rotten, old bananas
hanging out in the kitchen.
I don't want to eat these.
They're too mushy,
but they're perfect for baking.
If you don't have these bananas
and you have just regular ripe ones,
that's totally fine too.
Pop 'em onto a baking sheet
and bake them at 350 for about 10 minutes
or until they're blackened.
Then, just allow them to cool for a little bit,
and they're gonna be soft as pudding and totally great.
Bananas add a ton of flavor and moisture to your cake.
We want about four bananas, which is two cups.
But I really want two cups, or about four bananas.
You could have giant bananas.
That would give you too much moisture,
and your cake just wouldn't have that nice crumb.
Or little baby bananas,
and then your cake would be dry and not very banana-y
So I'm gonna measure these out
and mush them into a liquid measuring cup,
just so I can be sure to have exactly two cups.
Okay.
Just mush as you go.
It's easier that way.
If you're a little bit under or a little bit over,
it's fine.
It's not like you're making a French macaron
and everything has to be perfect.
This is an easy-breezy sheet cake, people.
Seeing this always gives me flashbacks to elementary school
when I had a banana in my backpack
mushed up and so bruised.
So by the time I opened it,
it looked like this, but all over.
I was just like (chuckles).
But this is a much happier memory.
It's gonna be a delicious cake.
(chuckles).
Mm, those school lunches didn't always hit right.
Little baby Johnny didn't know
about using them for banana cake.
Let's see what we got here.
Oh.
That looks like it's just about two cups, perfect.
Into a medium bowl,
I'm gonna add all of my mushed up banana.
Mmm.
I love banana bread,
but banana cake takes it a step further.
It's so moist and melt-in-your-mouth amazing.
And it's topped with the most luscious
cream cheese frosting ever.
So, ah, it's a lot of delicious flavors happening at once.
Into my mushed up bananas,
I'm adding 1/2 a cup of room temperature milk.
If your milk's ice-cold,
you can just warm it up in the microwave.
Now, I want one tablespoon of lemon juice,
or the juice of about a half a lemon.
When you add acid into a cake, it does a couple things.
One, lemon juice is delicious.
It gives it a nice lift.
But it's also gonna react with the baking soda
to puff things up.
And it's gonna inhibit the flour's proteins from forming up
and doing things that might make your cake chewy.
So it'll give you a really tender crumb.
I'm gonna mix and mash.
There's still a few lumps of banana in here
that I want to get rid of.
Once it's all mixed up,
we're gonna set this aside.
Grab a stand mixer with the paddle attachment,
and get to beating up our butter and sugar.
Wait a second.
We actually need to whisk
the dry ingredients together first.
Butter's after that.
In a large bowl,
I'm gonna whisk together 3 1/2 cups,
or 420 grams, of all-purpose flour,
along with one teaspoon of cinnamon.
Turn that scale on first (chuckles).
That's okay.
(slide beeps)
Scales are great.
More accurate measurements,
but you have to turn them on.
Okay, 420 grams.
Perfect.
One teaspoon of cinnamon goes a long way.
You could also add in your favorite spices,
like allspice or cardamom, a little bit of nutmeg.
They'll all work well.
Now, I want 1 1/4 teaspoons of baking soda.
This needs an acid to react with.
The lemon juice is here to do that.
I'm also adding in one teaspoon of kosher salt.
If you're using fine table salt,
I would use 3/4 of a teaspoon,
'cause there's more salt crystals in a measuring spoon
when they're smaller.
My scale is done,
so right now we're gonna give this a really quick whisk.
Set it aside,
and get to mixing our butter and sugars up.
In the bowl of my stand mixer
fitted with a paddle attachment,
or in a big bowl if you're using a hand mixer,
I'm adding one cup, or 226 grams,
of unsalted room temperature butter.
The temperature of butter is so important.
If it's too hard, it's really not gonna mix up well.
If it's too soft,
you won't be able to fluff it up and aerate it
so your cake is gonna be leavened, light and airy.
This is perfect.
Just a little bit of pressure,
and I can indent into the butter nicely.
In you go for just a little bit of creaming,
30 seconds on high.
That'll give the butter a head start,
and then we can add our sugars.
I'm using both brown and white sugar for this.
And the white sugar is amazing,
but the brown sugar is even more delicious
and has a slightly acidic nature,
which, again, will react with the baking soda.
I want 1 1/2 cups, or 300 grams, of granulated sugar.
In you go.
Now we're gonna add in one cup of packed light brown sugar.
(chuckles) It's packed.
And I usually like
to crumble the brown sugar up with my hands,
because there's always some lumps hanging out in there.
All right, I will be scraping the bowl down a couple times.
Might as well start now.
I'm gonna mix this on medium high for about four minutes
until it is light and fluffy.
I'll show you what that looks like.
While that's mixing up,
I'm cracking four large eggs into a bowl.
These are room temperature as well.
Room temperature ingredients are really great for cakes.
One, because they mix well together.
And two, if you're adding in
ice-cold ingredients in your oven,
oh my gosh, that center is gonna take so long to bake.
By the time it's done,
the outside of your cake will be crispy and kind of burnt.
Okay, look at the difference just a few minutes makes.
This, to me, looks like peanut butter frosting.
It's so light and fluffy.
We beat a lot of air into here.
And now, along with the baking soda,
your cake is just gonna be fluffy and amazing.
Reduce speed to medium.
I'm adding my eggs in one at a time.
Just give them a couple beats to mix in well.
And then, yes, you will be scraping that bowl down
at least once in the whole egg process.
If you just dump your eggs in,
you can get a kind of cottage cheesy texture,
and there's just too much liquid all at once
to absorb into your butter.
Speaking of butter, I have a wall of packed butter
on the side of my mixer,
and the inside is a soup of eggs,
so we really need to scrape that down.
You want a homogenous mixture that's the same throughout.
Back to mixing.
More eggs.
I'm also mixing in one tablespoon of vanilla.
That's 15 mils.
It's my homemade batch.
This, by the way, is a great party cake.
And speaking of peanut butter,
'cause it looks like peanut butter to me,
you could add a few tablespoons of peanut butter
into the mix,
and maybe 1/4 to a 1/3 of a cup
of peanut butter into the frosting
for a peanut butter banana cake if you want.
You would just add that peanut butter in with the butter
at the beginning of this part.
This looks great.
I'm gonna add my flour and my banana milk mixture
in alternating batches,
mixing it until it's almost combined.
There we go.
I'm aiming for three batches of dry
and two batches of wet.
Batch number two.
Adding in the remaining milk
and banana.
Adding in the last bit of the flour.
And I'm stopping the mixer.
I don't wanna overmix my batter.
If you watch this channel,
you know I'm always harping on this,
but the two things that can go really wrong making any cake.
Adding too much flour gives you a dense, bready cake,
which is why we love to use a scale.
And overmixing your batter,
you're activating all the proteins in the flour,
and that is gonna give you a gummy, dense cake.
Not good at all.
If you want a light, melt-in-your-mouth amazing cake,
use the right amount of flour
and mix it until it is just combined.
Mixer is done.
I'm finishing this by hand.
Use your spatula and just fold the batter together.
It's an optional step,
but this lets you, one, scrape the bowl down.
And two, you have so much control
and you can stop mixing as soon as it's ready.
It's just too easy to let a mixer keep running.
And it can smell disaster.
This looks amazing and the smell is just divine.
Oh, by the way, yes, you could also add
chocolate chips to this if you wanted to.
There's so many additions you could make.
It's a totally versatile recipe.
My batter's ready to pour,
but having these parchment paper handles is so handy.
These are metal clips.
They're oven-safe.
And if you use them,
you can be sure the paper won't flop back onto your cake.
Pour that batter in,
and then we're gonna level it off.
So much delicious batter in there.
Smooth that out.
Cakes will level off in the oven a bit,
but you always wanna give them the best start possible.
There's something so nice about a big, thick sheet cake.
This goes into the oven, 350 for about 55 to 60 minutes
or until the center is springy
and a skewer inserted in the middle comes out clean.
(upbeat music)
My cake cooled just about completely in the pan,
so I wanna show you the magic of parchment paper.
All you have to do is
lift it out and transfer.
It's as easy as that.
And my pan is so much cleaner than it would be otherwise.
It's time for our cream cheese frosting.
So we're gonna have 1/2 a cup
of unsalted room temperature butter,
along with eight ounces of cream cheese.
I softened this in the microwave,
because it was a little bit too stiff for me.
Okay, I'm gonna cream both of these up
until they're creamy and a little bit fluffy.
Mmm.
We want our frosting to be luscious and melt-in-your-mouth,
so there is no gloms of butter or cream cheese.
It'll all be worked in together.
It's never a bad idea
to give your bowl a little bit of a scrape.
There could be some butter hidden on the bottom.
And, in fact, there was.
Continue mixing.
I'm gonna add in about two teaspoons of vanilla.
Okay, I just wanna show you how creamy
and fluffy this is already.
Come take a look.
It's like a beautiful, delicious cloud.
Everything's creamy and fluffy.
So now I'm adding in 4 1/2 cups,
or 540 grams, of powdered sugar.
And it's a good idea to do this in a couple batches,
because you don't want a sugar explosion.
Whenever you have a frosting with powdered sugar,
you can add as much or as little as like.
It's really to taste.
It's not like a meringue buttercream,
where it has to be somewhat specific amount of sugar.
It's really, how sweet do you want it
and how structured you want it?
Because the more sugar you add in,
the stiffer it gets as well.
I'm also adding in an optional pinch of salt.
It's totally up to you, though.
We're gonna mix this on low until it's creamy,
add in the next batch of sugar,
and then beat on high for about a minute
until it is light and fluffy.
This looks like a mess right now,
but mixing will fix everything.
So mix on low until the powdered sugar is incorporated,
and then move it up to high to medium high
to really whip it up for about a minute.
It'll smooth out and get more slack and be perfect.
Yeah, already, that looks amazing.
The final scrape of the video.
If you're using a hand mixer for this,
less scraping down,
but a lot more clacking on the bowl as your mixer hits it.
And you need a really big bowl,
because it'll fly everywhere.
And if you had wanted to,
you could have added about 1/4 to 1/3 of a cup
of smooth peanut butter in with the butter and cream cheese
for a peanut butter cream cheese frosting.
I love sheet cakes
because they're great for taking to parties
and are easy to transport,
but I don't like having that really gnarly paper
on the bottom from the bake,
so I'm gonna transfer it to fresh paper
so it'll look nice and clean,
and it's really easy to move again.
All you have to do is peel as you place,
and just like that, you have a beautiful,
really nice cake to present.
My favorite way to apply frosting onto a sheet cake
is with a big triggered ice cream scoop.
It's efficient, satisfying,
and it really will not tear at the cake.
Sometimes these can be very tender,
'cause they're amazing.
And if you're swiping frosting on,
you can rip the cake or get crumbs,
and that's kind of annoying.
Now use an offset spatula and swoop away.
If your frosting looks a little bit bubbly,
just swoop, swoop, swoop,
and it'll become smooth and amazing.
Give it a slice, and your cake is ready to enjoy.
Mmm, that is a delicious combination
of banana cream cheese melt-in-your-mouth cake
and luscious frosting.
I hope you get a chance to make this recipe.
And if you liked this video, check out my banana playlist.