Banana Pecan Cake

Brown bananas, anyone?

When I unpacked my pick-up grocery order and found ten over-ripe bananas, it was hard to have charitable thoughts. I tried though. It was an early-morning pickup. Maybe the not-so-ripe ones hadn't been unpacked yet. Maybe this was all they had. Still, those bananas were supposed to last all week. What was I going to do with ten spotty ones?  

The answer was this recipe. I'd had my eye on it for a while, so I forgave that (possibly) desperate personal shopper and thanked them for saving me from having to decide which dessert to make for Sunday dinner. Banana Pecan Cake it was. And, banana lover me was not sad. 

How to make Banana Pecan Cake

The recipe called for three large bananas or one-and-a-half cups of mashed banana. My first task, then, was to mash three large bananas and see if they did indeed measure the correct amount.  

The answer, because it's not obvious from the photo, was . . . pretty close. 

Next, I creamed the butter and sugar. I added the oil and beat that well. The resulting mixture was light and fluffy. 

I added the flour, salt, and baking soda to a sieve but hesitated when I got to the spices. As I mentioned above, I like banana-flavored things. In fact, if I ever had to choose a last meal, Ben and Jerry's Chunky Monkey ice cream on top of a brownie would be my choice of dessert.  Therefore, I worried that the cinnamon and cloves would mess with one of my favorite flavors. However, I also wanted to test the recipe as written, so I added those spices too. 

There weren't many directions with this recipe, so I made up some of my own. I alternately added the flour mixture, the bananas, and the milk, and beat that together. 

Since this was called Banana Pecan Cake, I figured the pecans had better not be optional. If that was the case, I wanted them to be as tasty as possible, so I toasted the nuts for a few minutes in a skillet. 

Once they had cooled, I chopped them up. I had searched banana cake recipes to see what kinds of frosting people were putting on their cake (more on that later), and saw that someone had sprinkled pecans on top of hers. Inspired by that recipe, I set aside half a cup of the pecans and added the rest to the cake batter. 

The recipe said to turn the batter into a greased tube pan. I preferred using a Bundt pan, so that's what I did. 

The oven temperature for this recipe was a little lower than normal at 325 degrees, and the baking time a little longer at an hour and ten minutes. When I took the cake out, it was definitely done. Next time, I'll start checking five minutes before the listed time. 

Grandma had a lot of cake recipes without a frosting to go with them. However, my mother once told me that Grandma never served a naked cake. Therefore, I searched "Banana Pecan Cake" to see what other people had done and found that several had topped their cakes with cream cheese frosting. 

Sounded good to me. I made a basic cream cheese frosting and spread it over the top and down the sides. I then sprinkled on the remaining pecans. I'm no pro at cake decorating, but I thought it looked pretty good. 

The Verdict

I cut a slice and found the interior a rich caramel color, speckled with banana and nuts. It looked a lot like banana bread, actually. 

The taste, however, sang "cake." It was moist, sweet, and rich in banana flavor, so much so that I wouldn't have guessed it contained spices. The choice of cream cheese frosting turned out to be a good one because the tang of it contrasted beautifully with the sweetness of the cake. This one was delicious through and through. 

I decided to list the spices as optional because they didn't add much to the taste of the cake. They didn't subtract anything either, so feel free to use them if you'd like. 

If you're a banana lover like I am, or if you find yourself with too many brown bananas and a group of people to feed, you're in luck. The quandry of what to make for dessert has been solved. Try this delicious cake.