Happy National Bundt Cake Day

I’d been eyeing my pile of very ripe bananas for a couple days now, just waiting for them to be ready to make banana bread with.  Because A: Who doesn’t love banana bread? & 2: it’s a very simple recipe that I can share with you.

It just so happened that my bananas reached an awesome state of ripeness on this holy day. National Bundt Cake Day.

As I mentioned on my birthday post, my mother bought me a mini Bundt cake pan.  And I have been eager to pour anything possible into it’s tiny cavities. So I’ve combined my obsession with my new bakeware with my desire to make banana bread and I shamelessly call these Bundt cakes.

What I like about this particular banana bread recipe (passed onto by a friend on myspace… Do you remember Myspace?) is it’s simplicity.  You will not find a simpler Banana bread in the blog-o-sphere.  This recipe does not include nuts, because I don’t like nuts in my baked goods.  But I suppose you could add some if you like.

The Recipe:
5 ripe bananas
1 Cup Sugar
1 tsp Vanilla extract
1/4 Cup Water
2 Cups Flour
1 tsp Baking Powder
1/2 tsp Baking Soda
1 tsp Cinnamon
(I added 1/4 cup cocoa powder for this batch)

Put your 5 ripe peeled banana in a large bowl and mash them up.  You don’t have to mash them completely smooth. Banana bread is very forgiving.

Add your sweetener, vanilla & water to the mashed Bananas.  Mix well.

combine your dry ingredients and sift them into the wet ingredients.  As pictured, I added cocoa powder.  Fold the dry ingredients in to combine well.

Your batter will probably be much thicker than your average cake batter.

Here I diverge from the written instructions.  Normally you would put this batter in a loaf pan and bake at 350° F for an hour.  But as muffins or mini Bundts the cooking time is much less.  Mini Bundts have a much greater surface area for cooking, so these baked up in 15 minutes. Muffins, I would venture, would take 20 to 25 minutes.

I overfilled these because I didn’t want to make a second batch. I’m lazy like that.  But you could easily get a dozen moderately sized muffins from this.

Here are the finished mini-Bundts still in the pan.  I let them cool to firm up before attempting to dislodge them.

While these were cooling I decided to mix up a sugar glaze of powdered sugar, margarine, soymilk & chocolate extract.  I don’t have an exact recipe for this. I just do it on instinct.

dunk the Bundts & drizzle off the excess glaze before letting them set.

And here are my finished Bundts laid out on wax paper to catch any dripping glaze.

Happy Baking!