Banana Chocolate Cake with Ricotta

As my brother's birthday happened when he was still in Ghana, I grabbed the opportunity to bake him a birthday cake during his brief stay in Prague. I've missed baking cakes from my days in Barcelona too so I took this as a reason to go to IKEA and get their round cake form and also look for the perfect recipe for a grand cake. I came across a promotional leaflet from a supermarket that contained a recipe for a cake which looked appetizing, however, could be improved. How? Well, I decided to substitute the original fruit with bananas.

Eventually, there was a lot of cake. I split the work into two days - baking and filling the cake took a large chunk of a day 1, so I left the frosting for the other day and let the cake set in a fridge overnight. That allowed the filling to enter the corpus but the sliced bananas turned slightly unsightly brownish and the filling turned a bit yellow. But I haven't noticed anything wrong with the taste so I guess it was just a cosmetic change. In the end I had to come up with a way to transport half of it to my brother but some clever adjusting of a large shoebox took care of that.

NOTE: I had to double the amount of frosting/filling because I used what I had for the filling and then I was left with nothing for the cover. This recipe contains the doubled amount.

Banana Cake with Ricotta
for the cake corpus you will need:

the final product

• 200g of finely chopped walnuts
• 5 eggs
• 400g of finely ground flour
• 300g caster sugar
• 1 pack of baking powder
• 175g of butter
• 200g of dark chocolate
• 300ml of milk

for the cream you will need:

• 500ml cream (ready for whipping)
• 500g ricotta cheese
• 4 packs of vanilla sugar
• 4 or 5 bananas
• chocolate sprinkles

laying down the banana pillars of success

1. Preheat the oven to 160 degrees C. Grease and flour a cake form (around 20 cm in diameter). Make a double boiler and melt the dark chocolate over a just simmering water. In a large bowl mix the flour with sugar, the baking powder and the walnuts. Separate the yolks and the whites into different bowls. 
2. Mix the yolks with the melted butter and milk and then whip the egg whites into a firm foam. Pour the liquid ingredients (except for the foam) into the large bowl with the flour mixture and incorporate evenly. The chocolate should be melted by now so after you are done with mixing the batter, pour in the chocolate and stir well until completely brown. Pour the batter into the prepared cake form and bake for about 60 minutes or until a knife stuck into the centre comes out clean.
3. After the cake is done, let it cool completely. Then cut the cake horizontally into three even parts. If you don't trust yourself with the knife, take a strong thread, trace a circle around the cake with a knife and then place the thread in the ridge and cut the cake with by pulling on it as if you were tightening a shoe lace. If the insides are still warm, let them cool down some more.
4. In the meantime mix the ricotta with the vanilla sugar. In a separate bowl, whip the cream until peaking and combine with the sweet ricotta.
5. Spread the cream over each layer, place banana circles on it and cover them with some more cream. Once the cake is constructed from all three layers, cover the top and the sides with the remaining cream. Cut the remaining banana circles into halves and place them on the top. Sprinkle with chocolate sprinkles and let set in the fridge for at least an hour or two before serving.