Banana Cake with Coconut Streusel

Oh. Em. Gee! Guys, I totally baked the best thing ever today. Really, I did. It’s been a while since I’ve been this in love with something I’ve made.

I bought a crapton of bananas last week for snacks for Girls on the Run practice, but I had quite a few leftover. I figured I could always bake something with them, so I just left them alone until they were nearly black. Oh, by the way, anyone else think super ripe bananas smell like alcohol? I’m sure there’s a chemical reaction reason for that, but I don’t know why. Anyway, ripe bananas obviously lead to banana bread, which is delicious, but kind of played out if you know what I mean. So I made cake instead. I kind of consider this a coffee cake, but probably only because it has streusel. I guess I just equate streusel with the Entenmann’s coffee cakes of my youth.

The cake recipe is not super sweet, and would actually make a super awesome banana bread if you just want to use a loaf pan and skip the streusel. Ohhh, or banana coconut steusel muffins! Yeah. Make this baby portable. That would be pretty baller too.

Sour-Cream Banana Cake

• 1/2 cup butter, softened to room temperature
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 2 eggs
• 3 overripe bananas, roughly mashed
• 1/2 cup sour cream (light works just fine)
• 1-1/2 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/4 teaspoon salt

1. Preheat your oven to 350F.
2. In a large bowl, cream together butter and sugar until light and fluffy.
3. Add extract, eggs, sour cream and bananas and beat until well-mixed. Some chunks of bananas are fine.
4. In a smaller bowl, combine flour, baking soda and salt.
5. Slowly add dry ingredients to wet ingredients and mix gently until just combined.
6. Pour in 9″ cake pan (or loaf pan).
7. Cover with streusel topping (below) or continue onto step 8 and skip topping.
8. Bake cake at 350 for 45 minutes, or until done. Begin check after 35 minutes.

Coconut Streusel Topping

• 1/3 cup all-purpose flour
• 1/3 cup unsweetened coconut flakes
• 1/2 cup sugar in the raw (or regular sugar)
• 1/4 cup cold butter, cut into 1/2 inch cubes

1. Using pastry cutter or a mixer on low setting, mix ingredients together until butter is pea sized and mixture resembles coarse sand.
2. Cover cake completely.
3. Enjoy tropical deliciousness.

This was so crazy good. I enjoyed it as an afternoon snack, but I could totally see myself eating a small slice for breakfast and not feeling the slightest bit guilty about it. I love that the coconut streusel gives it an unexpected injection of tropical flava.

And now I’m off to couch it up. I did not sleep well last night and spending the afternoon with 12 3rd graders is exhausting! I don’t know how teachers do it everyday. 🙂