Fancy Apple Banana Cake

Last weekend I was trying to fill up my Saturday with projects while Steve was shooting a wedding. Since I hadn't gone shopping for ingredients to bake with, I decided to be resourceful and find a recipe that used ingredients I already had in the house.

Since we practically buy bananas in bulk, we always have quite a few sitting around. And I haven't been doing a good job of taking apples for lunch during the workweek, so we had a lot of those sitting around too.

Good think I happened upon this apple banana cake recipe.

I took my three apples and cut them into thin slices. This took quite awhile.


The slices were spread onto a cookie sheet, drizzled with honey, and baked until they were soft and smelled amazing.


I mixed up the batter for the cake, which was pretty straightforward: ripe bananas, sugar, honey, cinnamon, etc. Your basic makeup of any banana bread.

Half of the baked apple slices lined an 8-inch cake pan, while the other half were arranged in a spiral pattern on top of the batter.


After I pulled the cake from the oven and let it cool for a bit, I flipped it out onto a cookie sheet. Look at how yummy the apples on the bottom of the cake look!


I then flipped it over onto a cake stand and basked in the glory of my beautiful cake.


Unfortunately, the cake wasn't quite as glorious when Steve and I went to eat it. Because it had no butter or oil, the cake was rather dry. The flavors were nice and the addition of the apple was great, the cake itself could have used a little something extra. I think I would sub out the honey used in the batter for yogurt to fight against the dryness.

I enjoyed using the apples, though - what a great way to make a simple cake just a little bit fancy!

Apple Banana Cake
Recipe from The Taste Space

2 large, very ripe bananas
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 cup honey*
2 eggs
1 3/4 cups all purpose flour
1 tbsp baking powder
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 tsp nutmeg
Pinch of salt
3 large Golden Delicious apples, sliced (1/8th of an inch)

Additional honey, for drizzling DIRECTIONS Arrange the sliced apples on a baking sheet and drizzle honey over them. Bake at 400 degrees for 10-15 minutes, or until apples are moist and tender. Remove the apples from the oven and lower its heat to 350 degrees.

In a large bowl, mash bananas and sugar until combined and creamy. Add the honey and eggs and continue to beat until well combined. Add the flour, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, and nutmeg, and mix until combined.

Grease an 8″ round cake pan, and arrange one layer of apple slices on the bottom of the pan (use a little less than half the apples). Pour the banana batter into the pan, and arrange a second layer of apples on the top, in an overlapping pattern. Bake the cake in a preheated 350°F oven for one hour and ten minutes.

*Note: I would experiment with subbing out the honey for yogurt to help the overall texture of the cake.