Best Banana Cake Recipe (2024)

FAQs

What do you need for a Dolly Parton banana cake? ›

This means it's tempting to toss all your bananas into the mix when you're ready to bake, to avoid food waste. But if you add too much of the fruit into your batter, your bread could turn out mushy, heavy, and wet. So, it's a good idea to always stick to the recipe's instructions.

Using a lot of bananas adds excess moisture, and there are two ways to get rid of it. You could either add more flour or increase the baking time. Add a tablespoon of extra flour at a time into the batter and give it a good whisk until its consistency starts to look right: thick but runny enough to fall off a spoon.

You Over-Mix the Batter

For soft and tender banana bread, gently stir the wet ingredients into the dry — don't overmix! The more you stir, the more gluten will develop. The result will be a tough, rubbery banana bread. Simply stir until moist, and then do no more.

Room Temperature Butter / Don't Over-Cream

Most cakes begin with creaming butter and sugar together. Butter is capable of holding air and the creaming process is when butter traps that air. While baking, that trapped air expands and produces a fluffy cake. No properly creamed butter = no air = no fluffiness.

“My ideal birthday cake,” said Dolly when she spoke to Taste of Home, “would probably be a big ol' chocolate cake with thick icing like my mama used to make for all us kids.” And what sort of frosting covers a decadent chocolate cake? “Thick chocolate fudge icing,” said Dolly.

If you purposely or accidentally used baking soda instead of baking powder without making any changes to your recipe, you'll definitely end up with a bitter taste. Remember, baking soda is an alkaline, or base, ingredient that naturally has a bitter taste. Baking powder is a multi-ingredient leavener.

While it's okay if the banana peel is dark brown or even black, if the inside is too, then the fruit is beyond ripe and now on its way to rotten. Another sign that bananas have gone bad is if they start leaking any fluids. When in doubt, just toss the bananas out.

In much smaller quantities, the baking soda still has a chemical reaction with acid. Low and behold the acidic component is in bananas, so any excess baking soda that doesn't help the banana bread rise will react, hence green or blue banana bread slices the next day.

What is the secret to baking a moist cake? ›

If you were to use exclusively oil, the cake would turn out much denser than you may have intended. If you're unsure, it's safest to use a 50/50 combination of butter and oil instead of replacing the butter completely.

There's too much liquid. Opening the oven or moving pans during baking. Oven temperature is too low, or cake isn't baked long enough.

The experts at Allrecipes list excessive bananas as a common banana bread-making blunder, claiming it could make the bread feel a bit more hefty and moist in the middle. So instead of nice, airy, light bread, you might end up with mushy, dense bread that seems undercooked.

Short Answer: The alkaline environment of a batter with baking soda results in discoloration of the pulp fibers. Short Answer: The alkaline environment of a batter with baking soda results in discoloration of the pulp fibers.

Dolly Parton Adds to Her Line of Duncan Hines Baking Mixes

Mixes new in this release include chocolate cake and chocolate frosting, yellow cake mix, cinnamon crumb cake mix, blueberry muffin mix, and banana nut muffin mix.

Banana Cake Ingredients

For the cake: bananas, lemon juice, all-purpose flour, baking soda, salt, white sugar, butter, eggs, vanilla extract, and buttermilk.

Dolly Parton Baking Collection – Duncan Hines.

One taste of Dolly's cake with the cream cheese frosting and I was in heaven. The cake layers were soft and fluffy with just the right amount of coconut flavor to balance the tangy sweet frosting. You can be sure I will be making this cake again!