APT7: Banana-Caramel Cake

I had 6 very ripe bananas and wanted to do something with them. My go-to is always banana bread. I wanted to experiment and do something slightly different. Here’s what I came up with, and spoiler alert, it came out delicious.

I took liberties with the Fanny Farmer Banana Nut Bread and this Homemade Salted Caramel Recipe to make my creation.

Important note: I’ve been cooking and baking for a very long time. I tend to wing it a lot because I know what I’m doing. Below is my best attempt to recreate how I baked this so that you can try it yourself. So, your results may vary.

1. Preheat oven to 350F.
2. Make the caramel sauce. In a sauce pan, melt 1 cup of granulated sugar and 6 tablespoons of butter together over high heat. This will come together quickly, so keep stirring and don’t walk away from it. I eyeballed the amount of half-and-half cream I used, although the recipe calls for 1/2 cup. I let this boil for maybe 5–10 minutes. I also put in 1 teaspoon of pure vanilla extract. The heat turns it into boiling, frothy mess and looks very metal. Turn the heat down and let it settle. When it resembles caramel sauce, remove it from the heat entirely. Once it has cooled from being hot lava, carefully put it into a container and shove it into the freezer. Keep an eye on it. You don’t want it to freeze, just cool down and thicken.
3. Cake batter. Take however many close to rotten bananas you have. I happened to have 6 and wanted to use them all to make a moist cake. Peel the bananas, put them in a bowl with 4 eggs and 1 teaspoon of pure vanilla extract. Mush ’em, mash ’em, with whatever you got. I have an actual potato masher tool, so I start with that, then smooth it out with a hand mixer. Set bowl aside.
4. Go check on your caramel in the freezer. Is it frozen? No? Good. Put it back.
5. Grab another bowl and put 2 level cups of all-purpose flour in with 1 teaspoon of baking soda and 1 teaspoon of salt. (That’s baking SODA not baking powder. There is a difference.) Take a fork or a pastry blender and mix the flour together with the other ingredients.
6. Pop back over to the freezer and grab the caramel sauce out. Take a fork, spoon, or your finger (I won’t judge) and give it a stir. Put it down on the counter and stop sampling it. It does taste good, right? It should be a latte color and just a tad viscous.
7. Combine the banana mush in with the flour mix and stir well. Make sure you get all the flour working into the wet ingredients. Just do this by hand, for Pete’s sake, use some elbow grease and get it done. It won’t take very long and it’s just quicker.
8. I used an 8.5 x 11 in glass baking pan (like this.) I sprayed the sides and the bottom with a lot of PAM cooking spray. I poured the batter into the pan and made sure that it was spread evenly.
9. Now is when the diva that is caramel sauce makes its entrance. Take the caramel sauce and pour it back-and-forth long ways across the cake batter. Then, take a fork and drag it through the batter to spread it throughout and it makes a pretty feathering type of design.
10. Pop that baking pan into your already pre-heated oven. That was the first step. You did remember to do that, right? Plan for it to take an hour to bake, but check on it maybe after half an hour to see how it is coming along. At around the 45-minute mark, take a toothpick and test out the center. If the toothpick does not come out with a gooey residue, then pull that sucker out and let it cool. Keep in mind that oven temperatures vary, as well as the baking time for different types of pans. Glass pans cook at different times than metal pans. So, figure out the baking time based on what you are using.
11. Once cooled, you’ll find that it’s not super sweet and has full banana flavor. Enjoy!

The cake batter is in the pan and ready for the pre-heated oven!

Fresh and hot out of the oven!

When it’s finally cool, you can dig in and eat!