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Beauty-on-the-inside banana cake

May 23, 2018 7 Comments

For my birthday this year I had the intention of making a chai-scented layer cake, with a vanilla frosting. While I love chai tea and thought these flavours would lend beautifully for a cake, I must admit that most of my inspiration for this cake came from how it would look. I had visions of a beautiful naked layer cake that I wanted to style to share with you here. I made purchased a cake two years back when I first launched my online Food Styling and Photography Guides and loved styling and photographing it for the promotional shots. As much as I love food, I love styling and photographing it as well; for me there’s something so rewarding about making delicious food that you put so much effort into making look beautiful and then capturing that moment.

But, there was a slight issue with my layer cake. I’m not the biggest fan of cake. Especially more traditional sponge-type cake with frosting. And therefore I don’t make that many cakes, so when I made my first attempt at the cake, to say it didn’t go so well is an understatement. The batter was a mess, completely unsalvageable, and had to be thrown in the bin. When you’re using good quality ingredients like I was, all of the organic butter and free-range eggs add up, and it turned out to be an expensive exercise. 

It was at this point that I realised this cake wasn’t going to happen, and instead I should stick to the types of cake I know and love.

Banana coconut cake | To Her Core

I’ve been playing around with banana breads and loafs recently after B went to the shops and bought 20 bananas. I often get annoyed with him when he only replaces food items after they have been completely eaten and we have gone a few days without having any of said food item in the pantry. So he decided to stock up on some pantry staples so we had good supply to last as a while. We now have a shelf full of jars of tomato puree, canned coconut cream, legumes and lentils… and 20 blackening bananas! Suffice to say there has been a lot of banana cake consumed the last two weeks… ;)

But back to this cake. I wanted bananas in it, but I was growing a little sick of the traditional banana bread. I had been thinking about the option of caramalising the bananas, and I loved the idea of a more dense cake with coconut and almond meal.

When I threw all these ideas together, the result was a coconut-flecked cake with a beautiful, slightly dense crumb, topped with sticky caramel bananas. It was decadent and rich – and perhaps slightly sweeter than I would normally take my sweets, despite cutting down the amount of sugar. But hey, what are birthdays for if not indulging a little?

The downside of this cake is that it is not the beautiful frosted layer cake I had originally envisioned, but rather a somewhat dark, sloppy-looking unphotogenic cake. But what this cake lacks in physical beauty it definitely makes up for in flavour.

This cake is best served warm with a dollop of thick cream.

4.0 from 1 reviews
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Beauty-on-the-inside banana cake
 
Ingredients
Caramelised bananas
  • 70g butter
  • 100g coconut sugar
  • ½ pod fresh vanilla
  • 3 large, ripe bananas, halved lengthwise
Coconut cake
  • 150g butter, melted
  • 80g shredded coconut
  • 150g plain flour
  • 30g almond meal
  • 3 eggs
  • 50g sugar
  • 2 Tbsp honey
  • 1 tsp cinnamon
  • 2 tsp baking powder
  • ¼ tsp salt
Instructions
  1. Preheat oven to 170 C | 340 F
  2. To make the caramel, put the butter and sugar in a small saucepan over low to medium heat until the butter has melted and it has formed a thick paste. Stir in the vanilla.
  3. Pour into a greased 23cm|9" springform cake tin and layer the bananas on top. Set aside.
  4. Melt the butter and honey together in a small saucepan.
  5. Add all the dry ingredients except for the sugar into a bowl and stir to combine.
  6. Beat the eggs and sugar at high speed in a mixer until light and fluffy. Reduce speed to medium and add in the dry ingredients a bit at a time.
  7. Reduce speed to low and pour in the melted butter and honey mixture in a slow stream.
  8. Gently pour into the prepared pan on top of the bananas and spread evenly.
  9. Bake 30 - 40 minutes. Check after 25 minutes - if the top is too brown at this stage, cover with foil for the remaining cooking time.
  10. Cool for 10 minutes in the pan, then invert onto a serving plate.
  11. Best served warm, but is also nice at room temperature.
3.5.3251

Banana coconut cake | To Her Core

Filed Under: Breads and baking, Desserts, Recipe Tagged With: banana, butter, cake, caramel, coconut, coconut sugar

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Comments

  1. Cassie Thuvan Tran says

    May 24, 2018 at 12:49 pm

    Don’t judge a cake by its exterior! I would still dig into this beautifully plated banana cake. Can’t believe it’s so easy to make as well!

    Reply
    • tohercore says

      May 28, 2018 at 9:42 am

      Thanks so much Cassie – it comes together really easy for something with so many elements to it :)

      Reply
  2. Danielle says

    May 25, 2018 at 4:51 am

    Could I replace the flour with a gf flour such as coconut, etc?

    Reply
    • tohercore says

      May 28, 2018 at 9:44 am

      Hi Danielle. Coconut flour is quite dry and therefore you can’t normally sub one-to-one with wheat flour. I would try something like brown rice flour instead :)

      Reply
  3. Kathleen says

    May 30, 2018 at 7:16 am

    I disagree – I think it’s moody and rustic and gorgeous – and you’ve styled and captured it perfectly. I always end up freezing the extra bananas for baking with later so that we don’t get banana overload. Must try caramelizimg some soon!

    Reply
    • tohercore says

      May 30, 2018 at 7:09 pm

      Thanks so much Kathleen! I freeze a lot too, but Im sure I’ll be caramalising more from now on – so delicious! – D x

      Reply
  4. Eva says

    October 24, 2018 at 8:41 pm

    Thank you for sharing the recipe.

    Reply

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