HCB - Chocolate Banana Stud Cake

The Heavenly Cake Bakers baked the Chocolate Banana Stud Cake this week. This is a delicious chocolate butter cake with a small amount of mashed banana in the batter. The "stud" part in the name comes from the chocolate chips that adorn the cake. Studding the cake all over with chocolate chips is an easy but time consuming process, so I cheated a little bit and used REALLY big chocolate chips.

Droste milk chocolate pastilles

Ok, they're not chocolate chips. They're "pastilles" or chocolate disks, about 1" in diameter, and they're made by Droste (you might know Droste cocoa powder). I brought these delicious chocolates with me from Holland. These particular ones were milk chocolate with 35% cocoa content. Yum!

Delicious Chocolate Banana Stud Cake... but what's inside?

Click on the "read more" link below to read about the changes I made to the recipe.

When I offered to bring dessert to a dinner party we had today, I figured this cake would be perfect. With all respect to Rose Levy Beranbaum, taking a one layer cake to a dinner party didn't seem right or "fancy" enough. So I baked it into an 8" two layer cake. My filling of choice: strawberry mousse. You can find the recipe for the mousse HERE. All you do is replace raspberry puree with an equal amount of strawberry puree.

The cake batter came together quickly. Instead of mixing the liquid ingredients in a food processor, I used my immersion blender which worked great.

Immersion blender to mix the liquid ingredients

The batter looked somewhat curdled which worried me a little bit especially since there was no mention of it in the recipe. I continued and divided the batter into two 8" cake pans, and a small ramekin (quality control, remember?).

Both cakes and cakelette are ready for the oven (despite the curdled look)

After a 25 minute visit to a 350 degrees F oven, the cakes are ready.

The cakes are baked and cooling on the wire rack

I leveled both cakes and sandwiched the strawberry mousse between them.

 The cake is filled and is waiting to be glazed

Since I didn't have enough cream, I passed on the ganache glaze and went with my go-to chocolate glaze instead. While making the glaze, I kept the cake in the refrigerator. After glazing the cake, I studded it with the chocolate pastilles and the chocolate chips. The way I planted the pastilles on the cakes made it easy to divide the cake into 16 small servings.

This cake was a big hit at the dinner party. Between the 7 of us, we ate 12 slices of cake. Some were disciplined and had only slice (like my husband) while others, on the "carpe diem" side of life, had 2 or 3 slices :o) Either way, I was happy it was such a big hit.

A picture of my second slice of cake. Delicioso!

Final thoughts/tips:

• Everybody, including hubby and I, loved this cake. The cake was soft, melt-in-your-mouth tender, with lots of chocolate flavor, and a hint of banana. Hubby's rating: 8.5 out of 10.
• In addition to the obvious change in size and cake format, I also substituted 2 Tbsp of butter with canola oil. I find that a chocolate cake is more moist that way.
• I added about a teaspoon of Medaglia d'Oro instant espresso powder to the batter to heighten the chocolate batter.
• Something funny I'd like to share. When I asked the dinner party hosts and their guests if they could guess "the secret ingredient" of the chocolate cake, nobody was able to guess it. I told them it's a fruit and still no dice. Then I asked them to smell the cake before eating them, and sure enough, the banana aroma became obvious and about half said "banana" :o)