Cynthia L. Herzog 
Forget banana bread and make Ina Garten’s Banana Cake with overripe bananas. The recipe for Barefoot Contessa Cake is easy to follow. And, unlike banana bread, it has a cream cheese frosting.
Overripe bananas spurred the invention of Ina Garten’s old-fashioned banana cake
For some, overripe bananas in the kitchen could mean banana bread is in the near future. But when Garten found herself at Barefoot Contessa, the specialty food store she ran for decades, with an abundance of overripe bananas, she went in a different direction.
As the Food Network star explained in her 2010 cookbook Barefoot Contessa, Is it easy?, she has come up with a recipe for banana cake. “At Barefoot Contessa, we always felt like we had too many overripe bananas, so I came up with this delicious banana cake to use them up,” Garten explained.
She went on to say that over time, banana cake, officially called Old Fashioned Banana Cake, has become a favorite among customers. She said, “Eventually the cake was so popular that we didn’t have enough bananas to meet the demand for the cake!”
How to Make Barefoot Contessa’s Banana Cake
According to recipe instructions via Food Network, Garten’s Banana Cake can be made in just under 90 minutes. As the cookbook author explained when making the cake on barefoot countessit starts with “very ripe bananas”.
She crushes them with a fork before putting them in the bowl of a stand mixer. “I combine all the wet ingredients first,” she said, adding light brown sugar, eggs, sour cream, “good” vanilla extract, vegetable oil and lemon zest. ‘orange.
“It’s actually one of my favorite cakes,” she said, noting that it’s “a really easy cake to make.”
Sifting together the dry ingredients – flour, baking soda and kosher salt – she slowly put them into the bowl with the mixer on low. “If you throw it all in, you’ll end up with lumps, and nobody needs lumps in their banana cake,” she explained.
Once all the ingredients were combined, she transferred the dough to a baking dish. After 45-50 minutes in the oven, Garten removed the cake and let it cool.
Meanwhile, she combined cream cheese and butter, both at room temperature, with powdered sugar and more “good” vanilla extract to make the frosting. When the cake had completely cooled, Garten frosted the cake and covered it with some nuts for decoration.
Reviews give the cake 5 stars
Critics love Garten’s banana cake. The recipe, which has been reviewed nearly 200 times, averages five stars on the Food Network website. Reviews range from “the most amazing cake ever” and “the cream cheese frosting is to die for” to “simple but perfect” and “something you’ll never want to be without”.
“I have made this recipe countless times and am always raving about how perfect it is,” wrote one reviewer. “This cake is one of those understated yet amazing recipes,” added another. Another described it as “essentially the best banana bread you’ve ever had with frosting.”
“Most banana cakes are firm and dry, but not this one! another wrote before calling it “so yummy and sweet.” One oven called it “so much better than banana bread”.
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