This Cake is Bananas! B-A-N-A-N-A-S.

Don't you want a piece right now?  Those of you who don't like Bananas may not particularly enjoy this cake, but for everyone else, this is an incredible and tasty alternative to the usual banana bread that graces many a tables after finding a banana or two that have seen better days.

Ingredients:
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened
1 cup sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
3/4 cup milk (skim is fine)
3/4 cup mashed ripe bananas (about 2 medium)
1/2 cup walnuts finely chopped

Frosting:
2 Tb unsalted butter, softened
1 (12 oz) package cream cheese, softened (reduced fat is fine, fat free is not)
1 ripe banana, mashed
1/4 tsp freshly grated nutmeg
2 tsp vanilla extract
3 Tb cream or milk (skim is fine, cream just makes it richer)
1 lb confectioner's sugar

After the obvious preheating of the oven to the standard 350 degrees, I chopped up a few handfuls of walnuts, because the crunch adds a lot to any cake or bread.

Next I mixed the flour, baking soda, and baking powder in a bowl.  You'll see why I did this later, and you know there's a reason because I always leave out extra bowls if I can help it.

In another bowl I mixed the softened butter, egg, vanilla, and sugar.  Don't they look so pretty all in a row?

Use the beaters and mix it up until you have a nice smooth, thick, batter.

Meanwhile you'll want to mash up your bananas.  Mine weren't really ripe enough, but I was firm in my fork usage so it worked out alright anyway.

Now you're going to slowly add in the flour mixture alternately with the milk, starting and ending with the flour.

Now some milk:

And then the last bit of the flour!  See how pretty it curves?  You can go surfing on it, it's that smooth.  Man, can you imagine surfing on cake batter?  It's the stuff of dreams I tell you.

Now fold in your chopped walnuts:

Pour it in a greased cake pan (I used a bundt, but any pan will do) and bake for 30-40 minutes or until it has a nice golden top:

This is actually just half the cake recipe.  The original recipe makes a three layer cake, but that's a lot of cake and I was having a small meal so I didn't want to over-do it.  That said, it's super easy to double the recipe and make twice as much.  If you love bananas, cake, and people, I say go for it!

Now onto the frosting.  I should warn you, I'm actually pretty terrible at frosting.  For some reason, with cream cheese frostings especially, I always get a liquidy glaze, not a thick frosting.  This was no exception.  But I went with it and it totally worked.  So I guess if you do exactly what I did, you'll get the same results.  But if you're a great cream cheese frosting maker, feel free to go wild with your own recipe.  What makes this special is the fact that is has a banana in the frosting and nutmeg which majorly brings out the flavor.

So to start with, throw the butter, cream cheese, and mashed banana in a bowl.  I used the amount of butter recommended in the original recipe and it was unnecessary.  Usually the only way I can get a cream cheese frosting to work at all is to completely remove butter from the equation.  So you can either use 4 Tb of butter (what I did but wouldn't do again), use 2 Tb (which may still be more than you need), or use none at all.  But if you use the 4 Tb it will look like this:

Then when you mix it all together and dash the nutmeg on top it looks like this:

Pretty right?  Now you'll add vanilla and the milk (you can probably skip the milk if you want, or at least use half as much as this recipe claims you should use):

Now add confectioners sugar.  This is where it started to look kind of more like a glaze than a frosting for me.  But maybe yours will work better than mine.  I did add in the entirety of the sugar in the 1 lb bag. 

But despite all my besting, it was to no avail.  So I ended up refrigerating it overnight and then in the morning when it was still pretty thin I just poured it over the cake anyway, sprinkled some walnuts and cinnamon on top, and served it for dessert. 

Despite by best efforts to apologize for the runny frosting, my guests assured me it was delicious.  They all had seconds, and over the next few days, I had thirds, fourths, and perhaps went as far as fifths.  So like I say, make this at your own risk.  Because I can vouch for how good it is, but not for how slim your waistline will stay while it's in the house.