The Art of Creating Giant Bananas: A Step-by-Step Guide

As I sat down to work on my latest project, a giant banana cake, I couldn't help but think about the importance of patience and precision. The process of creating this cake was not an easy one, but with each step, it became more and more beautiful. First things first, I had to carefully texture the surface of the banana, making sure that there were no seams or imperfections.

To achieve a realistic banana texture, I used a combination of fondant and a veining tool. The fondant was applied in thin layers, allowing me to create a smooth and even surface. Next, I used my trusty veining tool to create the characteristic veins on the banana peel. It was a painstaking process, but one that was necessary for achieving an authentic look.

As I worked, I encountered a few unexpected problems. While cutting into one of the peels, my knife slipped and cut into the surrounding banana, causing me to panic. To avoid ruining the entire cake, I quickly applied a layer of thin light yellow fondant to cover up the mistake. I then textured the banana again, carefully marking the lines with my veining tool.

Despite the setbacks, I was determined to see my project through. I chose bananas as my subject because they have no seams, making them the perfect candidate for creating realistic textures. To achieve a seamless finish, I made sure to apply the fondant under the peels carefully, without any visible joins or imperfections.

To add an extra layer of realism, I used clay to extrude some light yellow fondant and create strands along the edges of the peel. These strands were inspired by the characteristic fibers that run through a banana when you peel it. While they may not be necessary for every cake, I thought they added a nice touch to my giant banana.

As the cake began to take shape, I knew that I had a long way to go before it was complete. Next, I needed to add color and shading to the surface of the banana. To achieve this, I used a combination of vanilla paint and dry brushing techniques. The result was a beautiful, sun-kissed look that seemed to glow in the light.

But no banana is perfect – at least not when it's ripe. To capture the imperfections of a real banana, I added some brown spots and lines to the surface of the cake. Using a combination of paint and dry brushing techniques, I created a realistic bruise pattern that added depth and texture to my giant banana.

Finally, after hours of work, my giant banana cake was complete. While it had its imperfections, I was proud of what I had achieved. With each step of the process, I had learned something new about creating realistic textures and adding color to a cake. Whether you're a seasoned pro or just starting out in cake decorating, I hope that this article has provided inspiration and guidance on how to create your own giant banana masterpiece.

And so, if you guys have any complaints about fruit that you'd like to leave below we'll put a link to the fruit complaint board um it's already filled with comments about watermelons don't even get me started on mealy apples don't make me go there now my biggest beef now is the flavorless strawberries yeah they're weird they're they're totally weird you're right i ate a strawberry that tasted like dirt i'm not even joking it's like some weird like prank i need to paint the banana and the inside of the skin so the fruit part of the banana and the inside of the skin because bananas brown quickly so right now it's the right color and it's very light but let's face it it only remains that color for one second after you peel it right so we gotta make it look like air has hit this banana in order to do that i'm painting these surfaces with vanilla it's the perfect color and it's not too dark and painting with vanilla is really great because it smells amazing um and it's all ready you don't need to dissolve it at all it's already thin so i just painted all those surfaces with vanilla to give it a more natural banana look oh now it's time to paint the banana like the skin of the banana so i'm going to dry brush the bottom of the banana near the nub and the top the stem with a little bit of a color i have called citrine it's actually um a really bright yellow when you dissolve this powder with alcohol but when you use it dry it's more of like a really yellowy green and i'm dry brushing these parts of the banana to make it look like it was once green and it ripened to be yellow it has to look like natural coloring and i also cut the stem of the banana a bit because often when you rip it off the bunch it rips and then that sort of open wound turns really black you know what i'm talking about like when you rip the banana away from its siblings right there's like a wound so that part i also painted with my brown paint to add some depth and shading to the surface.

Despite my love for bananas, I must admit that creating this cake was not without its challenges. But through trial and error, patience and precision, I was able to overcome each obstacle and create something truly special. Whether you're a banana lover or just looking for inspiration for your next cake decorating project, I hope that this article has provided valuable guidance and encouragement. Happy decorating!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthis week i baked giant bananas because i think we all feel a bit bananas you know what i mean we're bananas in pajamas that's what who we all are now i baked 16 pounds of my banana cake in two rectangular pans so eight pounds each i'm going to level both cakes and remove the caramelization from the bottom imagine banana cake in bananas that's the ultimate exception right i already made carrot cake in a giant carrot so it's only fair that i treat banana the same the next thing i'm gonna do is use circle cutters to cut perfect circles of banana cake out of my two rectangles i'm using two different size cutters so i chose a three inch cutter and a three and a quarter inch cutter yeah that's what i did so i'm gonna cut three in circles out of one cake three and a quarter in circles out of the other cake and then i'm going to line up all my banana circles and simple syrup them can i just tell you i've never seen changes so happy because when you cut circles out of a rectangle there's obviously like little diamonds in between they get left behind and there were a lot of scraps and i made up for the lack of banana cake on set over the past few years i just stuffed him full of banana cake now that the simple syrup has soaked into my banana cake circles i'm going to glue them together sandwich them together with ganache now normally when i fill in stack cakes i do it upright i'm not doing this for the banana i need to stack them all sideways kind of like i built the carrot then what i need to do in order to help the curve you kind of have to slice some of the discs on a diagonal because they naturally want to line up straight and the banana is not straight and mainly because i love chocolate banana how good would it be if you bit into a banana and there was chocolate inside like with all this grafting they do in the world can't they figure that out like when you eat a banana there's just like a row of chocolate in the middle that would be great and i need to repeat it a second time because as usual yolanda has to torture herself and make two difficult things my defense is i want one whole and one peeled right that's fair okay our cakes are chilled the ganache is fully set it's time to carve these cakes so they have a nice curve but they still need to be rounded out and they need to be a little more tapered at the top and at the bottom of the banana so i used a small serrated knife for this i found it easier i had bananas as a model much easier to work with than watermelons once again if you leave them sitting around a long time though they do get brown so so um they get upset yeah so just take your time carving the shape of the banana and once you're happy you can crumb coat the whole banana in chocolate ganache that's right more chocolate yum and now that the crumb coat is chilled i'm going to go back and ice the bananas with ganache now i need to pay close attention to the fact that when a banana is whole even though it looks smooth and curved you can actually see lines so i want to create that with my ganache so i'm using a sturdier ganache i'm going to make sure to really create those little angles it's almost like i'm making a pentagon over a curved rounded cake like i don't know how to describe it but this one like i'm trying to ice it so that it has a there's footage there's better footage than this but i'm trying to ice it so that you can see those angles the way banana skin looks and then on the oh yeah yeah i think the inside piece of fruit which also has lines yes it has like actual yes kind of like on the second banana i only want to do it halfway because where the banana is peeled you're right the fruit inside even though it has texture it's much more smooth and round no angles yeah no angles i don't have angled bananas um okay this is one of those cakes that like as i'm doing it i'm hoping this is gonna work to my advantage but i'm not really sure because i've never made a giant banana you're on the edge of your seat now i know like some cakes i make on the channel i think to myself how did it take this long this was one of them the first thing i'm gonna do is cover the half of the banana that is peel so the actual fruit part of the banana the part that you would bite so i'm using a very pale yellow fondant it's extremely pale and i'm just gonna cover the top half of that banana and now i need to texture this fondant so i'm using a sculpting tool a veining tool actually and i'm first doing lines that are uh vertical along the curve and then i need to use that same tool to create lines that run horizontally between two vertical lines and in either direction so try not to think about it too much get those first uh vertical lines really nice along the banana and then the ones in between it has a texture almost like a fabric like texture yeah um i obviously i appealed one of the models i asked the model to model nude so just it's just top only top only so um she peeled and then i used that banana as a yeah i use that banana as a model now i'm going to put this one in the fridge and i'm going to take out the banana that's not peeled and cover it and it's time to cover this entire banana so i roll my fondant out always make sure to measure your cakes so that you know when you roll it out and you drape it on top it will cover every part of the cake bananas are interesting because even as they ripen that yellow changes there's a stage where it's like i only want to eat it as a cooked green banana but once it's ripe enough to eat raw then i'll eat it um i feel like this is up for discussion people feel very strongly about how they eat bananas so leave a comment below and then i'm going to smooth it all along the cake i'm really happy because i am noticing my ankles so i'm going to use a fondant smoother to help me um accentuate those angles it's really weird because even though there's angles the cake is still curved you could just bang into the curve you'll see what i mean if any of you try to make two giant banana cakes you know now's the time and now here's the tricky part at the top where the banana has a stem that's usually joined to a whole bunch of stems in the bunch i need to figure out a way to do this so i had already decided this wouldn't be cake because it's in the middle of the banana and there's no way a thin piece of cake would just hold up in the air and then hold up fondant so what i'm going to do is take the time to insert a dowel and i'm using a plastic hollow dowel so they have these dowels they're plastic this one is like three quarters of an inch it's like a giant straw almost i was gonna think cool and the reason is it's much lighter than wood and it's also much thicker and i want that uh here i am again making another nub this time it's a banana nub um okay so now i have to cover go back to the other banana which is the peeled banana and i need to do the same thing but i need to cover just halfway up the cake right actually i'm wrong oh wait a minute let me tell you about this so when you peel a banana right the outside of the peel is the darker yellow banana cover color but when you peel the inside the inside of the peel is the same fleshy color as the banana right yeah it's almost like the layer of it it's like a layer comes off so i kept thinking to myself what do i do do i cover this cake cut it peel it and then try to glue the the lighter fondant into the peels like i just couldn't wrap my head around how to do it and then i thought here's what i'm gonna do i took my soft yellow fondant i rolled it out really thin and then i draped it over the part of my banana that's already covered so the fruit part of the banana but i'm not gluing it to the cake okay then i'm gonna brush the top surface of this light fondant the second layer of light on it with water so i'm brushing that whole top surface with water now i'm gonna roll out my banana colored fondant like the darker yellow and drape the whole cake okay and then just like i did before with the first banana uh i'm going to smooth it all along the banana i'm going to fold it at the bottom to get a nub i'm going to use my smoother halfway up to accentuate those angles and i'm going to trim away the excess from the bottom the only difference here is we don't need to create our stem just yet because we need to peel this banana so i took a sharp paring knife and i cut along the banana along those angled lines so what i did is i just carefully cut away and peeled back and it was awesome because that lighter fondant did stick to the yellow fondant and so the inside of the peel was a different color than the outside that's so cool sometimes risks have consequences so although i'm happy i did it this way and it worked the problem is when i was cutting one of the peels my knife went too far and actually cut into the banana that i had textured already now on bananas so i'm just gonna cover it with another layer of thin light yellow fondant and then texture the banana again i don't want to rip off what's there because i run the risk of dirtying everything with ganache the trickiest part was making sure i got that fondant under the peels there are no seams in bananas that's why i chose them i need to texture the inner light fondant of the peel because that same banana fruit texture is also inside the peel so again i'm going back to my veining tool and just carefully marking those lines just like i did to the banana if you're currently going bananas and you're a banana and pajamas please subscribe to this channel there's loads of cakes to watch in all your spare time oh and to make yes make them you don't have to start with giant bananas you can you can start smaller we actually have a bunch of live streams available you can bake at home in your pajamas so check out the link below maybe there's something you want to try and make and i also um clay extruded some of the light yellow fondant and put a few strands along the peels you know when you peel a banana and you get those like extra strands that's my one complaint about bananas i could do without that so i'd like some chocolate inside and none of those strands thank you thank you farmers yeah if you guys have any complaints about fruit that you'd like to leave below we'll put a link to the fruit complaint board um it's already filled with comments about watermelons don't even get me started on mealy apples don't make me go there now my biggest beef now is the flavorless strawberries yeah they're weird they're they're totally weird you're right i ate a strawberry that tasted like dirt i'm not even joking it's like some weird like prank i need to paint the banana and the inside of the skin so the fruit part of the banana and the inside of the skin because bananas brown quickly so right now it's the right color and it's very light but let's face it it only remains that color for one second after you peel it right so we gotta make it look like air has hit this banana and in order to do that i'm painting these surfaces with vanilla it's the perfect color and it's not too dark and painting with vanilla is really great because it smells amazing um and it's all ready you don't need to dissolve it at all it's already thin so i just painted all those surfaces with vanilla to give it a more natural banana look oh now it's time to paint the banana like the skin of the banana so i'm going to dry brush the bottom of the banana near the nub and the top the stem with a little bit of a color i have called citrine it's actually um a really bright yellow when you dissolve this powder with alcohol but when you use it dry it's more of like a really yellowy green and i'm dry brushing these parts of the banana to make it look like it was once green and it ripened to be yellow it has to look like natural coloring and i also cut the stem of the banana a bit because often when you rip it off the bunch it rips and then that sort of open wound turns really black you know what i'm talking about like when you rip the banana away from its siblings right there's like a wound so that part i also painted with my brown food coloring now it's time for the part i was avoiding well i've got it i mean i gotta bruise the banana a bit it has to have some brown spots some brown lines like they're very tender right you just you mishandle them and you can tell right i'm going to use a few different brushes i'm going to use a smaller brush and just start to paint dots some of the dots are separate some are in a cluster i also sort of painted fine lines along the angled lines of the banana and then used a dry brush to go back and blend them together i did a couple of lines that look like gashes so not along the angle but just sort of here and there all new membership teas and sprinkles are here this month's tea is cake it for the gram and our blends are cake talk and cakes to gram you can sign up for our memberships using the link below to get these before they're gone forever okay and then uh that's pretty much it that's how you take giant bananas yeah just follow the 7 000 steps and you too can make giant bananas if you loved watching me create this cake you can find more cakes right here thanks bananas and pajamas bye i'll see you next weekthis week i baked giant bananas because i think we all feel a bit bananas you know what i mean we're bananas in pajamas that's what who we all are now i baked 16 pounds of my banana cake in two rectangular pans so eight pounds each i'm going to level both cakes and remove the caramelization from the bottom imagine banana cake in bananas that's the ultimate exception right i already made carrot cake in a giant carrot so it's only fair that i treat banana the same the next thing i'm gonna do is use circle cutters to cut perfect circles of banana cake out of my two rectangles i'm using two different size cutters so i chose a three inch cutter and a three and a quarter inch cutter yeah that's what i did so i'm gonna cut three in circles out of one cake three and a quarter in circles out of the other cake and then i'm going to line up all my banana circles and simple syrup them can i just tell you i've never seen changes so happy because when you cut circles out of a rectangle there's obviously like little diamonds in between they get left behind and there were a lot of scraps and i made up for the lack of banana cake on set over the past few years i just stuffed him full of banana cake now that the simple syrup has soaked into my banana cake circles i'm going to glue them together sandwich them together with ganache now normally when i fill in stack cakes i do it upright i'm not doing this for the banana i need to stack them all sideways kind of like i built the carrot then what i need to do in order to help the curve you kind of have to slice some of the discs on a diagonal because they naturally want to line up straight and the banana is not straight and mainly because i love chocolate banana how good would it be if you bit into a banana and there was chocolate inside like with all this grafting they do in the world can't they figure that out like when you eat a banana there's just like a row of chocolate in the middle that would be great and i need to repeat it a second time because as usual yolanda has to torture herself and make two difficult things my defense is i want one whole and one peeled right that's fair okay our cakes are chilled the ganache is fully set it's time to carve these cakes so they have a nice curve but they still need to be rounded out and they need to be a little more tapered at the top and at the bottom of the banana so i used a small serrated knife for this i found it easier i had bananas as a model much easier to work with than watermelons once again if you leave them sitting around a long time though they do get brown so so um they get upset yeah so just take your time carving the shape of the banana and once you're happy you can crumb coat the whole banana in chocolate ganache that's right more chocolate yum and now that the crumb coat is chilled i'm going to go back and ice the bananas with ganache now i need to pay close attention to the fact that when a banana is whole even though it looks smooth and curved you can actually see lines so i want to create that with my ganache so i'm using a sturdier ganache i'm going to make sure to really create those little angles it's almost like i'm making a pentagon over a curved rounded cake like i don't know how to describe it but this one like i'm trying to ice it so that it has a there's footage there's better footage than this but i'm trying to ice it so that you can see those angles the way banana skin looks and then on the oh yeah yeah i think the inside piece of fruit which also has lines yes it has like actual yes kind of like on the second banana i only want to do it halfway because where the banana is peeled you're right the fruit inside even though it has texture it's much more smooth and round no angles yeah no angles i don't have angled bananas um okay this is one of those cakes that like as i'm doing it i'm hoping this is gonna work to my advantage but i'm not really sure because i've never made a giant banana you're on the edge of your seat now i know like some cakes i make on the channel i think to myself how did it take this long this was one of them the first thing i'm gonna do is cover the half of the banana that is peel so the actual fruit part of the banana the part that you would bite so i'm using a very pale yellow fondant it's extremely pale and i'm just gonna cover the top half of that banana and now i need to texture this fondant so i'm using a sculpting tool a veining tool actually and i'm first doing lines that are uh vertical along the curve and then i need to use that same tool to create lines that run horizontally between two vertical lines and in either direction so try not to think about it too much get those first uh vertical lines really nice along the banana and then the ones in between it has a texture almost like a fabric like texture yeah um i obviously i appealed one of the models i asked the model to model nude so just it's just top only top only so um she peeled and then i used that banana as a yeah i use that banana as a model now i'm going to put this one in the fridge and i'm going to take out the banana that's not peeled and cover it and it's time to cover this entire banana so i roll my fondant out always make sure to measure your cakes so that you know when you roll it out and you drape it on top it will cover every part of the cake bananas are interesting because even as they ripen that yellow changes there's a stage where it's like i only want to eat it as a cooked green banana but once it's ripe enough to eat raw then i'll eat it um i feel like this is up for discussion people feel very strongly about how they eat bananas so leave a comment below and then i'm going to smooth it all along the cake i'm really happy because i am noticing my ankles so i'm going to use a fondant smoother to help me um accentuate those angles it's really weird because even though there's angles the cake is still curved you could just bang into the curve you'll see what i mean if any of you try to make two giant banana cakes you know now's the time and now here's the tricky part at the top where the banana has a stem that's usually joined to a whole bunch of stems in the bunch i need to figure out a way to do this so i had already decided this wouldn't be cake because it's in the middle of the banana and there's no way a thin piece of cake would just hold up in the air and then hold up fondant so what i'm going to do is take the time to insert a dowel and i'm using a plastic hollow dowel so they have these dowels they're plastic this one is like three quarters of an inch it's like a giant straw almost i was gonna think cool and the reason is it's much lighter than wood and it's also much thicker and i want that uh here i am again making another nub this time it's a banana nub um okay so now i have to cover go back to the other banana which is the peeled banana and i need to do the same thing but i need to cover just halfway up the cake right actually i'm wrong oh wait a minute let me tell you about this so when you peel a banana right the outside of the peel is the darker yellow banana cover color but when you peel the inside the inside of the peel is the same fleshy color as the banana right yeah it's almost like the layer of it it's like a layer comes off so i kept thinking to myself what do i do do i cover this cake cut it peel it and then try to glue the the lighter fondant into the peels like i just couldn't wrap my head around how to do it and then i thought here's what i'm gonna do i took my soft yellow fondant i rolled it out really thin and then i draped it over the part of my banana that's already covered so the fruit part of the banana but i'm not gluing it to the cake okay then i'm gonna brush the top surface of this light fondant the second layer of light on it with water so i'm brushing that whole top surface with water now i'm gonna roll out my banana colored fondant like the darker yellow and drape the whole cake okay and then just like i did before with the first banana uh i'm going to smooth it all along the banana i'm going to fold it at the bottom to get a nub i'm going to use my smoother halfway up to accentuate those angles and i'm going to trim away the excess from the bottom the only difference here is we don't need to create our stem just yet because we need to peel this banana so i took a sharp paring knife and i cut along the banana along those angled lines so what i did is i just carefully cut away and peeled back and it was awesome because that lighter fondant did stick to the yellow fondant and so the inside of the peel was a different color than the outside that's so cool sometimes risks have consequences so although i'm happy i did it this way and it worked the problem is when i was cutting one of the peels my knife went too far and actually cut into the banana that i had textured already now on bananas so i'm just gonna cover it with another layer of thin light yellow fondant and then texture the banana again i don't want to rip off what's there because i run the risk of dirtying everything with ganache the trickiest part was making sure i got that fondant under the peels there are no seams in bananas that's why i chose them i need to texture the inner light fondant of the peel because that same banana fruit texture is also inside the peel so again i'm going back to my veining tool and just carefully marking those lines just like i did to the banana if you're currently going bananas and you're a banana and pajamas please subscribe to this channel there's loads of cakes to watch in all your spare time oh and to make yes make them you don't have to start with giant bananas you can you can start smaller we actually have a bunch of live streams available you can bake at home in your pajamas so check out the link below maybe there's something you want to try and make and i also um clay extruded some of the light yellow fondant and put a few strands along the peels you know when you peel a banana and you get those like extra strands that's my one complaint about bananas i could do without that so i'd like some chocolate inside and none of those strands thank you thank you farmers yeah if you guys have any complaints about fruit that you'd like to leave below we'll put a link to the fruit complaint board um it's already filled with comments about watermelons don't even get me started on mealy apples don't make me go there now my biggest beef now is the flavorless strawberries yeah they're weird they're they're totally weird you're right i ate a strawberry that tasted like dirt i'm not even joking it's like some weird like prank i need to paint the banana and the inside of the skin so the fruit part of the banana and the inside of the skin because bananas brown quickly so right now it's the right color and it's very light but let's face it it only remains that color for one second after you peel it right so we gotta make it look like air has hit this banana and in order to do that i'm painting these surfaces with vanilla it's the perfect color and it's not too dark and painting with vanilla is really great because it smells amazing um and it's all ready you don't need to dissolve it at all it's already thin so i just painted all those surfaces with vanilla to give it a more natural banana look oh now it's time to paint the banana like the skin of the banana so i'm going to dry brush the bottom of the banana near the nub and the top the stem with a little bit of a color i have called citrine it's actually um a really bright yellow when you dissolve this powder with alcohol but when you use it dry it's more of like a really yellowy green and i'm dry brushing these parts of the banana to make it look like it was once green and it ripened to be yellow it has to look like natural coloring and i also cut the stem of the banana a bit because often when you rip it off the bunch it rips and then that sort of open wound turns really black you know what i'm talking about like when you rip the banana away from its siblings right there's like a wound so that part i also painted with my brown food coloring now it's time for the part i was avoiding well i've got it i mean i gotta bruise the banana a bit it has to have some brown spots some brown lines like they're very tender right you just you mishandle them and you can tell right i'm going to use a few different brushes i'm going to use a smaller brush and just start to paint dots some of the dots are separate some are in a cluster i also sort of painted fine lines along the angled lines of the banana and then used a dry brush to go back and blend them together i did a couple of lines that look like gashes so not along the angle but just sort of here and there all new membership teas and sprinkles are here this month's tea is cake it for the gram and our blends are cake talk and cakes to gram you can sign up for our memberships using the link below to get these before they're gone forever okay and then uh that's pretty much it that's how you take giant bananas yeah just follow the 7 000 steps and you too can make giant bananas if you loved watching me create this cake you can find more cakes right here thanks bananas and pajamas bye i'll see you next week\n"