The Cake Slice: Banana Cake with Praline Filling and White Chocolate Ganache

Hey there, I'm still here! Just in time for The Cake Slice Bakers' monthly mingle. This month we baked a Banana Cake with Praline Filling and White Chocolate Ganache (whew, that's a mouthful) from the book Sky High: Irresistible Triple-Layer Cakes.

This is basically a white cake flavored with banana and spiced with cinnamon. The recipe asked for 2 cups of sugar which I thought will make a very sweet cake. But I wanted to follow the recipe and I was right, it was too sweet for me.

I'm also not a big fan of white chocolate. It tends to be sweeter compared to regular chocolate (is it because it lacks actual cocoa solids?) but like I said I wanted to follow the recipe so I used it anyway. I used some dark chocolate ganache on a couple of the mini cakes as well just because. :)

And the praline filling? My kids do not like nuts in their cakes so that's why you see them all outside the cake. Well, a few made it on top of the cakes. :) The book says this is an unusual way of making praline; the pecans were doused in sugar and deep-fried! The same thing you would do when making kamote-que so it was not too weird for me. :) In fact, this is the part of the cake I liked best, I couldn't stop munching on these!

I haven't done much baking since the holidays so I was looking forward to this. You can tell I had plenty of fun and made four mini cakes (or four mega petits fours) and decorated each differently:

cake #1 simply frosted, with a little spiral action;
cake #2 covered with dark chocolate ganache, cooled then poured with white chocolate ganache and decorated with praline;
cake #3 is like the the previous cake, order of ganache reversed;

and lastly cake #4, my "doodles" cake, dark chocolate was melted and poured into a squeeze bottle, then used to draw squiggly lines onto a baking sheet, let it harden then press onto sides. (I was trying to duplicate the spun sugar on my Dulce de Leche cake but I ran out of chocolate, oops.)

My kids couldn't decide which cake to slice into first. Which one would you pick?

Please be sure to visit my fellow bakers at The Cake Slice Bakers for the recipe and their own creations. I can't wait to check them out myself. I have learned so much from them these past months and they continually keep me inspired.