Banana Coffee Cake with Strawberry Whipped Cream and Chocolate Covered Strawberries

Hello! Hello! This is my first real blog entry about something I baked. :D Yay. It took me far too long to get all my pics and everything sorted (considering I baked this in mid June) but here it is!

Banana Coffee Cake with chocolate chips and walnuts,

Topped with homemade Strawberry Whipped Cream,

and Chocolate Covered Strawberries!

 

 So, I baked this for my dad for his Father's Day breakfast. I wanted to imitate the Banana Cake that Starbucks sells and someone sent me this amazing recipe. I chose this for Father's Day because my dad generally doesn't eat sugar and I figured something with plenty of fruits and nuts would be good. Turns out, I was wrong. Lol. It was still much too sweet for him (but he ate his whole piece anyway, ^_^ which was really sweet of him to do). I guess next time I'll bake him something like Carrot-Zucchini Bread. But even if it was too sugary for non-sugar person, it was still delicious! 

So here's the recipe and more pictures. Enjoy!

Here's just about everything I used in this baking endeavor:

RECIPE:

For the Cake:

• 3/4 cup all purpose flour
• 3/4 cup whole wheat flour
• 3/4 granulated sugar
• 3/4 tsp baking powder
• 3/4 tsp baking soda
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 3 tbs buttermilk
• 4 ounces butter (at room temperature)
• 1 egg
• 1 1/3 cups mashed bananas

For the Walnut and Chocolate Garnish/Filling:

• 1 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1/3 cup light brown sugar
• 1/2 cup chopped walnuts
• 3/4 cup semisweet chocolate chips

First, preheat your oven to 350°F (though I set mine to 325° because my oven runs hot). Next butter an 8x8 inch square baking pan. 

Combine the chocolate chips, walnuts, brown sugar, and cinnamon in a small bowl. Set this mixture aside. 


Sift together the flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt in a medium bowl. 


Then in a large bowl, cream together butter, sugar, and the egg using an electric mixer. Mix until airy and light. Add the mashed bananas and buttermilk, beat again till well combined.  

Then you'll have three bowls like this!

Next, add the dry ingredients to the wet and mix well. I prefer to do this step in thirds. 

Pour half the batter into the pan and spread it out evenly. (I usually pick up the pan and shimmy-shake it a bit to get the batter nice and even.) 

Distribute half of the chocolate chip, walnut mix over the batter. 

Pour the second half of the batter into the pan and even it out, then add the rest of the chocolate chip, walnut mix over the top.

 Here's the unbaked cake:

Bake for 35 to 40 minutes (or until a toothpick inserted into the middle comes out clean). I started checking mine at 30 minutes and ended up taking it out at about 33. 

I melted some extra chocolate (to make chocolate covered strawberries!) and poured my excess chocolate over the top of the cake. 

This is my end result:

 For the fresh Strawberry Whipped Cream:

I simply used Alton Brown's recipe found here at Food Network. And chopped/mashed up a fair amount of strawberries and mixed them into the finished whipped cream. 

I probably used about a cup of mashed strawberries. (I just kept adding till it looked/tasted right to me. Lol) But you could use anywhere from a 1/4 cup to give just a hint of flavor, to 2 cups and make it more strawberry than whipped cream. And you could use any fruit to make any kind of topping you want. 

For the Chocolate Covered Strawberries:

I melted the chocolate chips I didn't use in the cake in an improvised bain-marie. (I didn't add anything to the chocolate and I stirred it constantly.) Then I dipped the strawberries I didn't use in the whipped cream right into the chocolate. I set them on wax paper to cool and moved them to the fridge. 

I figured why not use my leftovers to create a fun garnish!

And that's it! I cut a square of cake, spooned a healthy helping of whipped cream on top, and added a chocolate strawberry to create the perfect breakfast! 

Thus concludes my first baking blog post. 

Thanks so much for reading!

- Christine Frankenstein