Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Frosted banana bars

Recently I made these frosted banana bars--delicious! This is another great treat (see yesterday's post about the funky monkey) to make if you have overripe bananas on hand, or if you simply feel like smashing bananas.



The original recipe is from the June/July 2000 issue of Taste of Home. If you don't have a subscription to that magazine, I highly recommend it and enthusiastically encourage you to do so. Taste of Home is chock-full of yummy recipes that are easy, delicious, and can usually be made with the current contents of your pantry/fridge.



While the recipe is intended as a potluck offering (made in a 15x10x1 baking sheet), I modified it a bit more for my purposes. To make a regular dessert, put the batter into a regular 13x9 cake pan and it comes out beautifully as a moist banana cake. Just be sure to increase the baking time by 5-10 minutes.


The cream cheese frosting is delicious, but you'll need to decrease the amount if you're make this as a cake and not as bars. Simply halve the frosting ingredients, and you'll be fine.




You can even skip the frosting all together and bake this as a pseudo banana bread. It's a versatile recipe.


Make this tonight--you won't be sorry. You'll be full from the banana-y goodness, but not sorry. Of course, if you eat this banana cake and top it off with a funky monkey, then you might go bananas from all the banana-y goodness. And I just can't be held responsible for that.


Get it? Go bananas? That's quality material, folks!
Sigh.
Time to work on my TMI disclaimer...for the banana-y goodness, and the puns.

3 comments:

Chicagolandia said...

Those look absolutely heavenly!

Sarah Eliza @ devastateboredom said...

They do look really good... do you know if I can freeze bananas? It seems like inevitably I just have one extra that ends up too ripe to eat, but there isn't much I can do with one banana (except smoothies and banana pancakes of course, I'm not dissing either of those guys ;P). So I was just thinking, if I can freeze bananas, maybe I could just save them up and make something once I had a couple in there...

Also, how's the existential crisis cookin'?

Amanda Grant said...

Sarah,
You can freeze bananas. Either chop them up, do a quick freeze (leave them on a cookie sheet uncovered for a few hours) and then bag them. Or, simply freeze them whole in the peels. You can eat them frozen, or toss them into the blender for smoothies, or let them defrost to use for baking.

My existential crisis has calmed for now. ;)