Thursday I made Martha's Banana-Caramel Cake (Martha Stewart's Baking Handbook, p. 157) for my book club. (Please forgive me: I couldn't find her recipe online. The closest thing I found was her Caramel Cake.)
If you like banana bread, you'll like this recipe. If you ever daydream of Bananas Foster, you'll love this recipe....because this cake is basically two layers of banana-bread cake with a layer of Bananas Foster in the middle (minus the rum) and a layer of icing on top....drizzled with caramel. Oh yes.
This is the first layer of cake with the caramelized bananas on top:
Everything went smoothly until I made the caramel to drizzle on top of the cake. I'm not sure exactly when wrong, but my caramel sauce basically turned into rock candy. The caramel was so hard I almost threw away the pot it was cooked in. The wooden spoon was actually cemented to the pot.
I'm not exaggerating. I had to soak both for a day before either came apart.
Since I had used the last of my heavy cream for the caramel, I dug through my refrigerator and found this:
Hallelujah! Thank you Hershey.
My cake (with cheating caramel sauce):
It was tremendously good, although I forgot to mention the cheating to my book club. I got side-tracked by the important Book Club discussion on which television shows we DVR.
Forgive me, ladies?
Did we discuss shows? That's not what I recall. :Wills and Harry:
ReplyDeleteBut the cake, ahhhhh, perfection. Even with the (delicious, gooey, I-eat-it-with-a-spoon) cheat sauce.