A Big Banana Cake | Baking with Dorie

This big banana cake is no joke in terms of its size and the time commitment getting to the finish line. I spent the full day yesterday making the cake, or struggling to get the various components of the batter, the frosting and the structure right. At times, it’s frustrating! Baking the banana cake by itself is, by far, the easy part.

I did not pay attention to the odd ingredient of the cookie spread, which Dorie specifies to be the Lotus Biscoff brand. I have no idea of what cookie spread is. Should I have learnt more about the lesser known ingredients before I started?

Lotus Biscoff is a uniquely crispy and aromatic cookies from Belgium — made with cinnamon and the deeply caramelized sweetness of toasted Belgian-style brown sugar. I thought I needed the cookies, which I made the night before using a recipe from Good Eats. As it turns out, these are the most wonderful, addictive, aromatic cookies I’ve ever made. However, when it comes time to make the frosting, I realize what I need is not the cookie, but the cookie spread. (i know now that cookie butter is everything we love about speculoos in general or Biscoff in particular.)

Alas, it’s clear to me it’s a step too far to take the homemade cookies to the consistency of a commercial-grade spreadable Lotus Biscoff butter. So in the middle of the day, I scrambled and went searching for the cookie spread. After visiting several grocery stores, I found it. That’s the struggle right from the start.

The next hurdle is to make the batter, using two types of flour (all-purpose and wheat) and sugar (brown and granulated). Besides, to succeed in making three even layers of cake you can stack up vertically, you need three cake pans of the same 9-inch diameter, and lined with parchment paper. (I contemplated about making a smaller cake, but was dissuaded from doing so because I don’t have three smaller cake pans.) After baking, the cakes have to be inverted, paper peeled away and cooled on the rack right side up.

Stacking, frosting and decorating a three-layer cake is where I fall short from inexperience. Little do I know I’m supposed to lay down the cake in this manner: The bottom layer is right side up. The middle layer is upside down. And the top layer is upside down. The reason is you want the three layers to settle down as leveled as possible. Mine is a little lopsided — to my eye (not to the camera). Once you put down one layer of cake, it’s difficult to rotate and reposition it. Once again, I struggle!

I set out to make a three-layer cake and I want it to look pretty. After all, the beauty of a big and fancy cake is all about its visual and festive appeal. With that in mind, I spend an awful amount of strokes layering and spreading the Biscoff cream cheese filling. I try to feather it on the side and the top of the cake as smoothly as possible. For whatever reason, it feels like I’m going one step forward and two steps back with little progress in achieving the illusive look of Dorie’s cake (on page 93). After I-don’t-know-how-long, while losing track of time, I sigh — in resignation. Stop and put the ugly-looking and half-finished cake in the fridge. It’s getting dark outside; it’s time to make dinner.

A few hours later, I come to the conclusion that the texture of the filling is not quite right and decide to do it over. To proceed, I need more confectioners’ sugar. (This time, my husband came to the rescue.) In the second round, I beat the helluva frosting and lightening it as mush as I can. You want the frosting to be light and silky and spreadable. Finally, the frosting is done, I rest the cake in the fridge and hope for the best. Since I have extra frosting laying around, I pick up a decorating tip and put a ring of flourishes on the edge of the cake. The big cake is finished — around the witching hour!

Tips to make the Big Banana Cake while having fun with it:

• Misen en place all the necessary ingredients, especially the cookie spread, the spices, two flours and two sugars, load of confectioners’ sugar, cream cheese, eggs and butter at room temperature.
• Set aside a good chunk of time for the project and, hopefully, without disruptions.
• Use three cake pans of the same size for the layers.
• Beat the filling in the stand mixer until it’s spreadable and billowy. Test it out with an offset spatula. That’d make frosting the cake go quicker and smoother.