As a young man living by himself, I tend to accumulate overly ripe bananas quite often. When this happens I usually go to my favorite banana bread recipe: Tyler Florence’s. Recently I was looking for something different to do with my leftover bananas. I scoured Epicurious for a great recipe and one stood out to me: Banana Chocolate Walnut Cake.
It was sort of a no-brainer. With a title like that how could I go wrong? I like bananas. I like chocolate. I like walnuts. Most importantly: I like cake.
So how did it turn out, you ask? It was pretty darned good. I used some really high quality chocolate, which always makes recipes like this particularly delicious. The cinnamon chocolate and walnut on the top and inside of the cake really worked to elevate this from standard banana bread to a high class cake that could be served at any time of day. I’m not really into chocolate in the morning, but if you are, this could absolutely be served at breakfast time. It could also be served as dessert after a nice meal (or let’s face it, even after a hastily prepared week night dinner).
I liked the addition of yogurt in the cake. Like buttermilk, it added a nice zip and kept the cake really moist and dense. The cake itself pretty much tasted like standard banana bread because, well, it was pretty much standard banana bread. There’s nothing wrong with that! Again, with the added touch of the topping, this recipe really becomes something more than just banana bread. I brought leftovers to my office and it was very popular.
I didn’t have the nine inch square baking pan that the recipe called for and I think I spent about twenty minutes trying to figure out what the right pan was to replace it. I ended up choosing my eight inch baking pan, figuring that it was close enough. It turned out fine in the smaller pan, so if you don’t have every size pan, don’t stress over it.
Clacked by Bob Degon
on Dec 04, 2009 @ 10:00 EST5EDT
