Banana Cake & Passionfruit Cream Cheese Icing

A simple recipe to get us through the middle of the week. Hands up who likes banana cake?! Or banana bread? Let's face it, banana bread is banana cake. I remember my first semester of uni, where every early morning physics lectures was preceeded by a huge mocha and a piece of toasted banana bread slathered with butter. I can't believe what a fatty I was. These days I still indulge in banana bread every now and then (without the copious amounts of butter), and whenever I feel like banana cake at home I always turn to my trusty Stephanie Alexander recipe from The Cook's Companion.

I've decided to add this recipe to the 'Foolproof' category, because it has never failed me no matter how many times I have done it, and no matter what kind of weird things I add to it. This time I happened to make it for Simon's birthday picnic, pairing it with this amazing passionfruit cream cheese icing which I've whipped up a couple times. Banana cake with passionfruit is a winner of a combination that I first tried years ago thanks to a birthday cake we bought my Mum from Simmone Logue, it beats plain cream cheese icing any day. I decided to keep it simple for Simon's picnic, mostly because I was super lazy, so I split the batter into half and baked them as thin cake slices rather than a full sized cake and slathered the top with the icing. Unfortunately for my poor cake was not prepared for the intensely humid 40+ degree weather at centennial park that day, and it pretty much collapsed on itself. I think the moisture from the cream cheese seeped into the cake, turning it into mush. Taking it home and refrigerating it didn't help, the whole thing went a bit strange textured. So I guess this cake is foolproof until you decide to spend the afternoon in oven-like conditions! But don't let my bad luck deter you, this cake is normally super moist and packed full of banana flavoured goodness.

Foolproof Banana Cake with Passionfruit Cream Cheese Icing
(Simple banana cake recipe from Stephanie Alexander's The Cook's Companion)
For the banana cake:
125g softened unsalted butter
1 1/2 cups sugar
2 eggs
1 cup mashed ripe banana (approx 2 large bananas or 2-3 medium bananas)
few drops pure vanilla
250g plain flour
1tsp bicarb soda
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/8 tsp ground allspice
1/2 cup buttermilk (or 1/2cup milk + 1 tsp lemon juice)

For the passionfruit cream cheese icing:
250g cream cheese, softened
1/4 lemon, juiced
75g icing sugar
125g unsalted butter, melted
3 passionfruit

Butter and flour a 20 cm square cake tin then line the base with baking paper (or two if you want to make thin cake slices rather than a full cake). Preheat oven to 180 degrees C. Cream butter and sugar until pale and fluffy. Bean in eggs, banana and vanilla. Sift dry ingredients and add to mixture, alternating with buttermilk. Spoon into tin and bake for 45 minutes or until cake tests clean. Cool cake in its tin on a wire rack for a few minutes before turning out.

Place cream cheese in a large mixing bowl and beat with an electric mixer until smooth. Sift icing sugar into bowl. Add butter & lemon juice and then beat together until well combined. The mixture should be quite shiny. Add pulp from passionfruit to the icing and fold to combine. Spread liberally over the cooled banana cake. Can be stored in the refrigerator in an air tight container.