Grandma's Recipes #12 - Banana Cake

This recipe calls for sour milk, which most modern recipes would just refer to as buttermilk.  If you don't have buttermilk in the fridge, add 1 tbsp vinegar or lemon juice to a scant cup of regular milk, preferably whole milk.  As is unfortunately so common in Grandma's recipes, ingredients or amounts are missing.  In this case, the bananas are completely missing from the ingredient list.  I did some Googling to try and find similar recipes, and I would suggest starting with 2.  As always, [gray brackets] are my additions.

Banana Cake

1/2 c    shortening

1/2 c    sugar

2          eggs

[2        bananas]

1 tsp    vanilla

2 c       flour

1 stp    soda

1/8 tsp salt

1/2 c   sour milk

1/2 c   chopped nuts

Cream shortening and sugar.  Add eggs.  Add bananas.  Add dry ingredients alternately with milk.  Fold in nuts.  

Bake at 350 for 45 to 50 minutes [in a 9x13" pan.  Frost with cream cheese or chocolate frosting].  

Birthday week cake

Of the six people on my team at work, three of us were born on November 17 or 18.  That makes for a pretty epic birthday week.  To celebrate, I made this cake, inspired a bit by my wedding cake, but mostly by my overly ambitions nature.

The bottom layer was a New York style cheesecake with oreo cookie crust made using this recipe.  The recipe didn't call for a water bath, and I didn't use one, but I think I should have.  Or at least cooked it just a tad longer.  My cheesecake ended up deflating, but it still had great flavor.

The second layer was an orange scented cake that I adapted from this recipe.  I literally just subbed the lemon zest and juice for orange.

Between the layers is a pomegranate jelly.  I tried to follow a recipe, but then I bought powdered pectin instead of liquid pectin and was left with 5 freshly juiced pomegranates and really no idea how to turn them into jelly.  (For reference, juicing 5 pomegranates by hand is NOT something I recommend.) In the end, I ended up following the recipe for raspberry jam in the pectin box, but cut in half, and without actually canning it.  Basically, I dumped sugar, juice, water and chemical powder in a pot, whisked as if my life depended on it for about 5 minutes, and hoped for the best.  Surprisingly, it turned out.

To top it all off, I made a simple chocolate ganache.  I didn't put any liquor in mine, but I think that a little triple sec or some other orange extract could have been a great way to tie all the flavors together.  When the ganache was still wet, I sprinkled the top with pomegranate seeds.  Beautiful and tasty!