Birthday Banana Cake

A good friend of mine has her parents in town visiting. I hadn't delivered her March dessert and it happened to be her dad's birthday. It seemed like a great opportunity to make good on what I owed. We settled on banana, walnut, and cream cheese, which naturally lead me to banana walnut cake with white chocolate cream cheese frosting (the old standby and one of her favourite frostings). For the banana walnut cake, I used this recipe. She had requested it eggless, so I substituted the eggs for a half cup of applesauce and 1 tsp baking soda. I also subbed the buttermilk for yoghurt (what I had on hand) and threw in a cupful of walnuts. I love banana cake, and its sibling, banana bread, for their versatility and sturdiness. It doesn't seem to matter to a banana cake if you use buttermilk, sour cream or yoghurt, if you threw in an extra half a banana or two, or if you bulked it up with nuts or chocolate chips. It's all good :) The cake, like the eggless banana cupcakes from earlier ago, came out a little pale and sank in the middle. You can't tell because I artfully covered it up with frosting (*^_^*) I was assured that it tasted fine and her parents sent me thanks.

Of course, when baking banana cake, you can't bake just one banana cake. Bananas generally come in bunches of six, and you usually only need three to a cake recipe. So this is mine, with eggs. All mine! Om nom nom nom!

"You put the chocolate chip in the coconut"

As I've grown older, I've found my palate changing. I hated tofu as a kid, but I love it now. I thought beer had a horrible bitter aftertaste a few short years ago, but now I seek out IPAs. I didn't like coconut in sweet things...

Like Charlie Brown, I hated having to pick a chocolate out of an assortment box because it would inevitably end up being the coconut-filled one. But as I read the recipe for these Coconut-Chocolate Chip Cupcakes, I found myself thinking, "This actually sounds pretty good. I can't wait to try them."

These wereApril's dessert-of-the-month, for a friend fond of coconut, chocolate and sweet. And they had me saying yes to coconut in sweet things! The coconut flavour was subtle, marrying beautifully with the dark chocolate chips. The cupcake wasn't quite as moist as I thought it would be (I may have overbaked them a tad), but the crumb was wonderful, not too dense or too light, giving the cupcake a nice mouth-feel to go with the sweet frosting. I toasted coconut flakes to decorate the cakes with. I did dip one in shredded coconut, but I wasn't sure I liked the look of it as well. You be the judge.

Perhaps it was the use of coconut flavouring instead of extract. I didn't realize there was a difference till I read the recipe. Flavouring was all they had at the store. I like to believe it was worth the premium, that the flavouring resulted in an un-artificial coconut taste (unlike what the coconut in chocolate assortment boxes taste like). I'll be looking out for more coconut-flavoured desserts.

Mebbe nattō is next.

Transcendence

This post is a little tardy...it's the fourth week of Easter, and this cake was dessert at the Resurrection. Whoops!

I have an internal definition for easy cakes vs. hard cakes. Easy cakes are ones that do not require eggs being separated and egg whites foamed. I lately made an addendum to that rule; chopping chocolate also makes a recipe hard, or at least not-easy. Yet, I can't bring myself to call this a hard recipe because that would be blaspheming against the domestic goddess. Yes, Nigella Lawson is the Domestic Goddess, and this divine confection is her Chocolate Cloud Cake. It's impressively elegant in its apparent simplicity and the overall gorgeous effect vs the chocolate-chopping and egg-foaming effort puts it in the not-really-that-hard category.

It's a flourless chocolate cake, the Grand Marnier is optional in both the cake and whipped cream. I sprinkled perles craquantes Valrhona (it's what it says on the bottom of the container. I think it roughly translates to "crunchy pearls" - they're like chocolate coated Rice Krispies®) on top for decoration. Here's a picture of the unfilled cake:
This picture is up here because it demonstrates my slightly- increasing skill in Photoshop :) I removed a portion of an aluminum foil box from the photo. If you look closely, I'm sure you'll be able to tell where and still see remnants of the box I didn't remove.