#replicake

You've probably heard of Yolanda Gampp aka How To Cake It. Her YouTube channel has over 3 million subscribers and she puts out great weekly content.

If you haven't checked her out already, I recommend that you do! This cake was inspired by her ice cream sundae cupcakes. While they were already cute enough, I decided gigantifying them would definitely level-up them. I was right, naturally.

This cake is honestly huge. I initially had only baked 2 cakes but decided to bake an extra cake after not being satisfied with the height of the cake. I'm glad I did. Of course, you can scale this cake down as you wish.

The actual cake is a moist and dense banana cake with a hint of cinnamon. I paired the cake with my favourite salted caramel recipe and a dark chocolate ganache to counteract the sweetness. 

The frosting is just a classic buttercream recipe but you could opt to use a meringue buttercream if you so wished.

I personally don't like meringue buttercreams as they taste too buttery and aren't sweet enough. A lot of people complain about regular buttercream having the grainy mouth feel of powdered sugar but that's actually one of the things I like about it!

This cake actually took me quite long to make as a whole. The carving was quite quick since I didn't need to shave much off the cake but the overall decorating process was quite tedious. 

I'm a little on the indecisive side so arranging the ice cream scoops to make them look realistic enough took quite a bit of time. 

I think the finished product looks pretty great, though! I love the striped buttercream effect. 

Make sure when you are blend your buttercream stripes together that you don't move the angle of your bench scraper or off-set spatula too much that the colours mix together. 

If this happens, scrape off a dab of the blended area and replace with some fresh buttercream and continue blending.

While I didn't flavour every scoop according to their colour, you definitely can with the use of extracts or flavoured syrups! 

You can also use your regular sugar cookie dough recipe minus the egg and with toasted flour if you don't like the taste of coconut oil but I personally love it and it also means that the cookie scoops set up really firm and hold their shape well.

To top, I piped a mountain of whipped cream, dowsed the whole thing in melted down ganache and caramel and showered the cake in sprinkles. I don't really like glace cherries but since this was an ice cream sundae cake, I placed a small cherry right on top.

Cake is quite honestly the only thing that is pulling me through these weeks of revisions. My exams start in 2 weeks (officially) and these exams are what determine if I get into my chosen university or not so I will be (or rather should be) studying hard and may seem a bit inactive on my Instagram account.

Queued posts will still stick to the regular schedule and I will try to bake as much as I can since it really does help me relax and is a good break from all the studying.

Yield: 1 huge 6 layer cake

Ingredients:

For the cake:

5 large bananas, very ripe and thoroughly mashed

500g self-raising flour

6 large eggs

225g butter/margarine

120ml oil

300g caster sugar

2 tsp cinnamon

2 tsp vanilla extract

For the ganache:

250g plain chocolate

250ml double/heavy cream

For the salted caramel, find the recipe here and double it.

For the coconut oil cookie dough (alternatively, use your own favourite cookie dough recipe. This one sets up quite hard):

225g coconut oil, softened

180g brown sugar

330g plain flour

Chocolate chips, strong coffee, food colouring

You will also need:

Large batch of buttercream (Roughly 400g butter and 600g icing sugar)

Whipped cream, glace cherry, sprinkles, wafer rolls etc.

Method:

Cake:

Preheat the oven to 350°F/177°C and line  two 6 inch cake pans and one 7 inch cake tin with greaseproof paper.

In a large bowl on a stand mixer, cream together the butter, oil and sugar until well combined and pale in colour.

Next, beat in the eggs, one at a time, along with the cinnamon and vanilla extract.

Mix in the banana mixture until just combined and then fold in the flour until no lumps remain. Make sure to scrape down the sides of the bowl.

Divide the batter between the cake pans. You won't need much in the 7 inch - it's just to help with better tapering of the cake, so put most of the batter into the other pans.

Bake for 1 hour or until a cake tester comes out clean when inserted into the middle of the cake. Leave to cool completely.

Ganache:

In a saucepan, bring the double cream to a near boil.

In a separate bowl, break the chocolate into small squares. Once the cream has reached a near boil, pour it over the chocolate and cover the bowl with a saucer.

After 5 minutes, begin to stir the mixture until homogeneous. Leave to cool in the fridge to thicken slightly.

Cookie dough:

In a large pan on low heat, begin to toast the flour. You will need to constantly be moving around the flour with a spatula so that it does not burn. Once it is hot to the touch, remove from the heat and leave to cool.

In a large bowl, combine the oil and sugar until well combined. 

Stir in the flour bit by bit after the flour has cooled until it reaches  a very soft cookie dough consistency that is still scoopable. You may need more or less flour. Leave out at room temperature. If you keep it in the fridge, it will set extremely hard. If it sets up too hard, you will need to melt it down in the microwave and add extra milk.

Assembly:

Level and torte all of the cakes so that you have 6 layers. Place the first largest 7 inch layer onto a cake board or platter and begin to layer up the cake with ganache and salted caramel in between each layer with  a ganache "dam" (a ring of ganache is piped around the outside of the cake layer prior to filling ) to prevent the filling from spilling out the sides.  Leave some ganache left over for crumb coating. Your cake layers should follow like this: 7 inch, 7 inch, 6 inch, 6 inch, 6 inch, 6 inch. Do not overfill, you can always serve extra caramel with the cake. Trust me on this. Chill the cake for at least 30 minutes in the freezer until the ganache has set up.

Using a sharp serrated knife, begin to carve the cake. You are carving the cake upside down (since it's easier) so being with trimming the first cake layer an inch or two inwards to create a smaller base. You don't want it too small for lack of support so trim it to 5 inches. Continue with the rest of the cake so that the cake tapers out gradually in a smooth slope.

Once you are satisfied with the cake shape, use left over ganache (slightly thinned down) to apply a thin crumb coat all over the cake. Chill the cake for another half hour.

After chilling, place another cake board on top of the cake and quickly flip the cake over so that the smallest part is now the base. Insert 5 or so dowels arranged in a ring for support.

Divide your buttercream into two portions and dye one pink. Transfer both into piping bags with a large corner cut off the end (vary the size of the corner for how thick you want your stripes to be).

Pipe rings of buttercream all around the cake, alternating colours and starting at the bottom. Once the whole cake has been covered in buttercream rings, chill for 20 minutes in the freezer until the buttercream has hardened slightly.

Take your offset spatula and begin to blend the stripes together, moving your spatula around the cake horizontally and not moving the angle of your spatula. Be careful, you don't want to smudge the edges and colours together but you want to smoothen out the stripes. Chill for another 30 minutes.

Using the rest of your pink buttercream in a piping bag with a star tip, pipe a ruffle border around the top of the cake and fill in the top of the cake with any more left over ganache or leave it empty.

Take your cookie dough and if it has hardened up too much, add some milk and heat it in the microwave for a couple of seconds. Divide the cookie dough into small portions and dye each portion a different colour or flavour them differently. I went for chocolate chip, coffee and different coloured cookie dough scoops.

Once you have prepared all of them, use an ice cream scoop to make cookie dough scoops. Arrange these all over the top of the cake and use a fork to roughen up the edges of the scoop so it looks more realistic.