RHC: Banana Refrigerator Cake with Dreamy Creamy White Chocolate Frosting

Free choice week for the Heavenly Cake Bakers: a chance to catch up with Marie on one of the cakes she baked before we started baking along. Once the icy streets had melted enough for me to get to a store, I bought some cream cheese and white chocolate for the frosting and was ready to make a half-size banana refrigerator cake. Luckily I had a frozen banana available (well, plus sister-in–law offered a backup banana that wasn't quite ideally ripe for banana cake), because the winter storm had left a dearth of bananas in my usual store.

I'm going with a quick write-up for this easy cake--I imagine only the frosting that keeps this one off the easy list, and it's not very difficult if the ingredient temperatures are OK.
For the cake, the wet ingredients (bananas, sour cream, eggs, lemon zest, and vanilla) are combined in a food processor for better homogenization of the banana. That combination transfers to the mixer for beating with turbinado sugar, then the oil (not butter, for better tenderness coming out of the fridge).The dry ingredients are sifted on top and beaten in, and the batter is done. Mine baked up with a fairly high dome in a 6" pan with a baking strip on it, and the small cake took longer than the time given for a full-sized one. I blame that on the more watery texture of my frozen banana. No sweat: I just frosted the dome. :)

For the frosting, the biggest issue was dealing with a yield of less than 1/2 cup. I turned to a mini-processor that came with my immersion blender, which took a little more scraping of the sides than if I'd been doing a full recipe in the big Cuisinart, but it got the job done. Unlike the last time I made the dreamy creamy white chocolate frosting, the melted white chocolate blended in to the butter-cream cheese mixture without forming any little chocolate chunks.



Tasting results: it's a hit! I love it--moist cake with a nice amount of banana flavor, and cream-cheese frosting. What's not to like? Younger brother really liked it, and so did older brother (in town so we could all three go spend the weekend working on our father's estate, to whit, getting stuff out of the house in south Georgia). I sent the rest of the little cake next door and didn't get a specific report other than "there's none left" when my brothers and I got back tonight. Next time there's an over-ripe banana around, I think I'll make this cake instead of freezing the banana--it would be a good snacking cake without the extra effort of the frosting.