Even after making Benjamina Ebuehi's Peanut Butter Banana Bread I still had more overripe bananas, so I decided to make Dan Lepard's "Butterscotch Banana Cake" from Short & Sweet. The oil-based cake includes bananas that have been cooked in a butterscotch sauce and mixed into the batter; the headnote describes the cake as having "a strong banana toffee flavour."
To make the butterscotch bananas, you cook sugar and water until you get a reddish-golden caramel; add sliced bananas, a little butter, and vanilla; cook the bananas in the caramel until they break up; and let the bananas cool. For the cake batter, you beat sugar with eggs and oil until thick; add in the cooled butterscotch bananas and yogurt (I didn't have any and used sour cream instead); and fold in the sifted dry ingredients (spelt flour, mixed spice, baking powder, and baking soda; mixed spice isn't really a thing in the United States, so I used pumpkin pie spice instead). I poured the batter into a parchment-lined pan to bake.
The cake had a very dark golden top and was done baking about 10 minutes before the time specified in the recipe. It was moist and had a nice spice flavor. But if you served this cake to me without telling me what it was, I would have just said it was spice cake -- I could barely taste the bananas. I think the fact that that the bananas are cooked in the caramel until they fall apart diluted the banana flavor substantially. I wish I had followed the suggestion in the headnote to add in some walnuts, because I thought this cake was missing something. Maybe it was some sort of texture contrast, maybe it was banana flavor, or maybe it was something like a cream cheese frosting.
I can't point to any technical flaws in the finished product, but I just didn't find it all that interesting. I was hoping that this would be an extra special version of banana cake, but instead it seemed like it wasn't a banana cake at all.
Recipe: "Butterscotch Banana Cake" from Short & Sweet by Dan Lepard, recipe available here from The Guardian.
To make the butterscotch bananas, you cook sugar and water until you get a reddish-golden caramel; add sliced bananas, a little butter, and vanilla; cook the bananas in the caramel until they break up; and let the bananas cool. For the cake batter, you beat sugar with eggs and oil until thick; add in the cooled butterscotch bananas and yogurt (I didn't have any and used sour cream instead); and fold in the sifted dry ingredients (spelt flour, mixed spice, baking powder, and baking soda; mixed spice isn't really a thing in the United States, so I used pumpkin pie spice instead). I poured the batter into a parchment-lined pan to bake.
I can't point to any technical flaws in the finished product, but I just didn't find it all that interesting. I was hoping that this would be an extra special version of banana cake, but instead it seemed like it wasn't a banana cake at all.
Recipe: "Butterscotch Banana Cake" from Short & Sweet by Dan Lepard, recipe available here from The Guardian.
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