Tropical Pineapple Crush Cake

I chose to make this cake for mum’s birthday as she likes fruity type cakes that aren’t too sweet. I dropped the sugar amount a little bit to ensure that the cake wouldn’t be too sweet for her liking. I still decided to make the frosting as I thought it would really add to the cake and this turned out to be true. Mum gave her thumbs up to this cake, even with the frosting.

The cake is very moist with all the banana in it and has this lovely fragrance to it due to the mixture of pineapple, banana, cinnamon and nutmeg. I didn’t add the optional macadamias this time but will add them next time as I think it will make the cake even nicer.



Tropical Pineapple Crush Cake
From Belinda Jeffery’s Mix and Bake

Ingredients
3 cups plain flour
1 ½ cup castor sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
1 heaped teaspoon ground cinnamon
¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg
½ cup roasted macadamias (optional)
3 eggs
1 ½ cups light olive oil
1 ½ teaspoons vanilla extract
1 cup canned crushed pineapple in natural juice undrained
5-6 medium sized bananas to give 2 cups mashed

Icing
125g softened unsalted butter, cut into chunks
250g softened cream cheese, cut into chunks
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
500g icing sugar mixture, sifted

Method
1) Preheat oven to 160C. Butter two 25cm round cake tins. Line the base with baking paper and dust the tings lightly with flour.
2) Put the flour, sugar, salt, bicarbonate of soda, cinnamon and nutmeg into a large bowl. Whisk together quickly. Add macadamias now if using them.
3) In another bowl, beat eggs lightly so well mixed but not frothed up. Whisk in the oil and vanilla extract until well combined. Add pineapple and mashed bananas and mix thoroughly.
4) Scrape banana mixture into the flour mixture and stir them together to form a thick batter. Divide batter between the two tins and smooth tops.
5) Bake for 45-50 minutes or until an inserted wooden skewer comes out clean. Cool cakes before turning them out of tin.
6) For icing, put all ingredients into a food processor and whiz until smooth and creamy.
7) Assemble cake by sandwiching the two cakes with icing in the centre. Spread remaining icing on top of the cake. I also decorated the cake with some left over crushed pineapple.