Banana Pound Cake

Here's another one of Ben's mom's recipes that I love to use!  I make this Banana Bread (sounds healthier than saying pound cake haha) fairly often and this year alone I have already made it three times!  Just to give you an idea of how good it is (the pictures below won't do it justice), I made it for my family for the first time about a year ago, and within a day the entire bundt cake was gone.  Since then, they've requested the banana cake over and over again.  I make a banana bread (my gamma's recipe--although it's been a while since I made that one) and banana crumb muffins (allrecipes.com recipe I tweaked) too, but for now I'm just going to post about the Banana Pound Cake since it's our most recent bake. 

This last time we made it, we decided to do muffins instead for our friends, Jessica and Steve (who are getting married 11.11.11 actually!).  Because I didn't want to take the chance of making it in a bundt pan, having it stick to the sides and presenting them with a mangled cake, muffins seemed like a much safer option. 

Here's the recipe...it's easy and the batter is just as delicious as the final cake!

Ingredients:

• 1 box yellow cake mix
• 1 (3 ¾ oz or so) pkg instant vanilla pudding mix
• 4 eggs, room temperature
• 1/3 cup vegetable oil
• ½ cup water
• 1 1/3 cup mashed ripe bananas (3 or 4 bananas)...(we used frozen bananas, allowed them to thaw, then mashed away)
• ½ tsp cinnamon
• ½ tsp nutmeg
• 1 tsp vanilla

Directions:

Combine all the ingredients in a large bowl and mix until blended.  The recipe suggests beating at medium speed for 4 minutes, but we skipped that step.  Ben's arm was fast enough haha.  Below I've showed you what we did...

Dry ingredients



Adding eggs and vanilla

Stir part 1

Add mushy bananas...looks errr, nice

Mix part 2

Once all the ingredients are mixed well, pour the batter into a well greased and floured (or powdered sugar) bundt pan.  Here, we used muffin cups instead and poured batter about 3/4 full in each cup.




 

If using a bundt pan, bake at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 1 hour.  Once done, allow cake to cool for 10 minutes in the pan, then turn it onto a rack to cool completely.  We just eye-balled the muffins and took them out when the a knife came out clean from the center of a muffin.

Gone bananas,

Hannah