I had a ton of bananas that I couldn’t finish before they started going brown and spotty. You know what that means, right? Time to bake something banana-y. Well, since we’re not supposed to leave our homes unless it’s to do essential business I needed to find a recipe where I already had all of the ingredients.
I Googled a ton of recipes and was trying to narrow it down when I came across one for “banana cake”. This recipe by Sally’s Baking Addiction appeared the most promising to me, because it has cinnamon in it and the “m” word was used to describe how amazing it is. Baking with bananas is tricky for me. I don’t always get it rid and bland is usually what I end up with.
Here is the link to Sally’s banana cake. I won’t be copying her recipe in this post, because it’s her recipe and you should go to her website to see it. I will share with you how I made mine though.
Sally said to cream soften room temperature butter. Well, I did not have room temperature butter (because I could not wait for it get to that temperature) so I stuck it in the microwave to warm up. I might have warmed it up a little too much, because it was half melted. I’m not sure what Sally would say, but I think it worked just fine for me.
I could not for the life of me find the whisk or beater attachments that belong to my hand mixer. The only ones I could find were the dough hooks…. So, I used dough hooks to combine all of my ingredients together. You can imagine how well that went. I had cake batter flying all over the place. I ended up using a regular whisk and as you can see from the picture the batter isn’t all that pretty. It’s gotta be the melted butter. Note for next time: let the butter get to room temperature on it’s own. Oh well.
Sally puts the batter into a 9×13 pan and adds cream cheese frosting to the end product. I didn’t have any cream cheese on hand and I’m not a fan of frosting anyway so I decided to put my batter into 2 loaf pans. I topped them with banana slices and hoped for the best.
After the cakes had been baking for about 5 minutes it occurred to me that the sugars in the banana slices might burn. Fortunately, Sally gives this great tip in her recipe about putting foil over the cakes if the tops start to brown too much. I did end up doing that about the last 10 minutes of baking.
So, here’s my banana cake which I ended up calling “banana spice cake” for some reason. There’s like 1 spice in it so I guess I could have called it banana cinnamon cake. I ate the ends which I sliced off thinly. The cake was indeed “m” word and it was AMAZING! I gave the rest of it to my sister so she could share it with her co-workers at the hospital. Despite my efforts to tell everyone it was a cake that I just happen to bake in loaf pans everyone called it banana bread.
Anyway, it was a hit at the hospital along with the Hershey’s chocolate cake that I baked as well. I made Rice Krispies treats too, but my sister decided after eating a couple of slices that she wasn’t going to share those and kept them for herself.
What have y’all been baking while self-quarantining?
– C
