I buy a lot of bananas with good one-a-day intentions and then end up with brown fruit that needs to be some sort of magical bread transforming. This (more often than not) doesn’t happen, but when it does, it’s always the same thing — banana nut bread.

TIME TO SHAKE THINGS UP IN BANANALAND.

I found this recipe on AllRecipes.com and gave it a shot, with a few tweaks that I gleaned from the comments. The reason I love AllRecipes.com in general isn’t so much for their recipes but for the wealth of information in the comments. It’s like a real-life test kitchen, with a dash of crazy, ornery and judgment thrown in for kicks.

Banana Cake with Banana Cream Cheese Frosting (adapted and tweaked for maximum nom)

(read on for recipe)


For the Cake

• 3/4 cup butter
• 1 1/2 cups white sugar
• 3 eggs
• 1.5 teaspoon vanilla extract (GOOD vanilla extract. None of that “flavored” crap.)
• 3/4 cup sour milk (made by taking 1 tbsp of vinegar and adding milk to make 1 cup.)
• ~ 1 cup mashed ripe bananas (I used about 3 small to medium ones, mashed well.
• 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon baking powder

Directions

1. In a large bowl, mix together butter, sugar, eggs and vanilla. Set aside.
2. In another bowl, sift together flour, salt, soda, and baking powder. Add these dry ingredients to the creamed mixture. Add sour milk and bananas to the batter. Beat together well.
3. Butter/grease/wax or parchment (I say parchment, it’s easier to clean) two 9 inch round cake pans, or one 9 x 13 inch pan.
4. Bake at 350 degrees F (175 degrees C) for 17 to 20 minutes for the layered cakes (Other users recommend longer cooking times, but definitely check and test. You don’t want to over bake this.) 30¬–35 minutes for the sheet cake. Mine took exactly 35 minutes for the 9 x 13.
5. Cool in the pan for 10 minutes and then turn over onto rack until it cools completely.

For the Frosting

See, here is where I think I either screwed up or got it right. Jury is still out. I asked the Englishman, but he said it was perfect as it was (but the English have different takes on frosting than I do. Yes, I did just stereotype the culinary attributes of an entire country. I may be mostly wrong but out of the MANY delicious cakes I’ve had whilst there, I can say they’re not so big on the sweetened cream cheese frostings.) and I asked my coworkers and all I got was, “Oh that was yummy!” and I appreciate all that, but I’d really like some honest feedback so I can get better. (Unless that IS honest feedback, in which case — awesome.)

I was looking for thick, sweet, cream cheese frosting — the kind you’d find topping the carrot cake at Whole Foods. I got yummy-tasting banana cream cheese frosting, but my consistency left a lot to be desired. It was thin. I think I underestimated the amount of cream cheese I would need. And then I ran out of confectioners sugar after 2 1/4 cups.

Also, I switched recipes midway.

Yeah, maybe this isn’t the best frosting recipe you’re going to find, but this is what I used

• 8 oz. of cream cheese
• 1 ripe banana
• 1/4 c. butter
• 2 1/4 c. powdered sugar (sifted*)
• 1.5–2 tsp. vanilla extract

Beat the hell out of this. I chilled mine (to try and make it more … big?) and then beat the hell out of it again. Meh. I don’t think that helped much.

See? A little thinner than I’d like.

But at the end of it all …

Still definitely nom worthy.

(EDIT: My trusty baker friend Monica says that I need way more powdered sugar and for the cake to be completely cool before I try frosting for maximum fluffy frosting benefits. YMMV.)

(EDIT #2: Okay, so I tooled around with the recipe for cream cheese frosting. Adding more cream cheese also helps. I didn’t go too, too crazy with the powdered sugar, you don’t want to over-sweeten the contrast between cake and frosting.)