This easy homemade banana cake with chocolate icing is a birthday party classic. The banana layer cake is quick and easy to make and pairs perfectly with the chocolate american buttercream.

Banana Cake with Chocolate Buttercream

I feel as if this cake is a childhood memory for most kids that grew up in New Zealand. Homemade Banana cake, covered in what we affectionately refer to as "shitty chocolate icing". You know the stuff - icing sugar, cocoa, a little bit of butter, and then a little bit of boiling water which inevitably turns into adding too much, having to add more icing sugar, overshooting that, adding more water, etc etc. The best. We often had this as our birthday cakes when we were kids, but would have 'plain' icing instead that we were allowed to colour ourselves - I have very strong memories of managing to get half a bottle of yellow food colouring into a bowl of icing and having THE most bright yellow cake ever. It was awesome. 

Turns out Rich has even more ties to homemade banana cake than I do - he went to boarding school and quite often his mum would make him a banana cake with  chocolate icing to have in his 'tuck box'. Lucky for him, I tend to be useless at remembering to use bananas up before they go brown, so banana cake/bread/shortbread happens extremely frequently in our house. 

The Best Banana Layer Cake

Rich also happens to not be a huge fan of buttercream. I have learnt to turn my back while he scrapes most of it off a cupcake into the bin. For this reason, (because he is the primary banana related baked goods consumer in our house), the ratio of this cake is mainly cake:not much buttercream. It is essentially two banana cakes, glued together with a teeny bit of buttercream. I like to run a line of piped buttercream between the two layers to tidy things up, then load up the top with icing sugar, pop on some rosemary, and we are away laughing. He requests it for his birthday every year, which makes life significantly easier on my part! 

The cake itself is super simple. It is a great go-to. (as are most recipes from the Edmonds cookbook). If my bananas are super ripe, and I would like minimal dishes, I throw them in the stand mixer with the creamed butter/sugar mixture rather than mashing them by hand. If they aren't crazy ripe, mashing them by hand helps. 

Easy Chocolate Buttercream

The buttercream is a slightly more fancy variation of "Shitty chocolate buttercream".  I like using butter straight out of the fridge and 'softening' it using the mixer, as opposed to softening it before you use it. It gives you a slightly colder finished product that is easier to handle. However I haven't tried this without a stand mixer, so if you are using an electric beater, it may be easier to have the butter already soft. The recipe here will leave you with some buttercream left over, which I figure is probably helpful as most people like a slightly higher ratio of buttercream to cake than this, so feel free to spread it on the top/sides. If you make this into a four layer cake (and slice the cakes into two), doubling the buttercream recipe would be beneficial.

This is a fairly large recipe, so if you only have a couple of bananas, or are looking for something smaller, halving it will work beautifully. 

Ps how great is the crown cake stand?!? My Mum got it for me the last time I was home, from a teeny pottery shop near Nelson (my hometown). Its a one of a kind, and is inspired by Max's crown from "Where the wild things are". It also turns up the other way and can be used as a bowl! I LOVE it! Thanks Mama Bear! xx

For more banana recipes, check out:

• Banana Shortbread
• Mini Banana Bundt Cakes with Coffee Salted Caramel
• Banana Sheet Cake with Whipped Dark Chocolate Ganache
• Nutella and Banana Rolls
• Easy Banana Bread

Recipe for Banana Cake with Chocolate Buttercream