Double chocolate 4-layer banana cake from Canadian Living

My kids all have special cakes for their birthdays. My oldest son loves the Dairy Queen chocolate explosion cake, my daughter loves the McCall’s School of Cooking’s perfect chocolate cake that I’ve been making since I was 14, and my middle son loves a four layer white and dark chocolate banana cake. It has become renowned in his circle of friends and is now anticipated each year.

I am a pretty good baker. I am great at following instructions, and for the most part, pretty confident with all things baking — although the perfect pie crust eludes me — but this cake is the bane of my existence. Every year the icing and I have a battle to see if I can get it right. If the cake gods cooperate, it’s a good year (I only make once a year, it’s not just time intensive, it’s also calorie intensive) and I win. This was not one of those years.

Chocolate banana cake

This cake lures the banana and chocolate lover into its recipe pages — the cake consists of a not-too-sweet banana cake with chocolate chunk pieces — cut into four layers, layered with fresh bananas and white chocolate icing, topped off with a layer of dark chocolate ganache. Reading the instructions makes it seem easy — and the cake and the ganache are quite easy and straightforward. It’s the damn icing that turns out to be the problem.

The thing about the icing is it seems like it should be pretty easy to make, after all, it involves three ingredients: white chocolate, whipping cream and vanilla. How could it possibly go wrong? It turns out it can go wrong in the blink of an eye. You turn away and the next thing you know it’s gone from a thin liquid to curdled chunks of chocolate and cream. Ugh! Do it right, however, and your reward is this smooth and silky white chocolate nirvana, that when paired with the banana cake and fresh bananas is heaven on a fork.

This year I had to make in between other activities of getting a new furnace quote, renewing my driver’s licence, walking our neighbour’s dog and going to a fitness class among other things. The icing curdled beyond anything I’ve ever done before. The good news is, I’ve discovered that instead of throwing it out, I can remelt it and try again….that worked last year. This year, I ended up with a strange pearlized version of it after remelting and rewhipping. Not quite curdled, but not completely blended either. Too bad — it was good enough. Although not my best work, it still tasted good — and I might have been a little more liberal with the chocolate ganache topping than usual.

For the recipe, visit Canadian Living