This stuff is bananas

by thebaking

It’s been longer while since posting than I thought it had been.

I’ve been baking still, of course.

And that’s that.

Back to the baking.

I saw a package of very ripe bananas in the reduced produce section at a supermarket the other day.

I bought the bananas.

Ripe bananas are ideal for banana bread.

I usually store ripe bananas in the freezer until I’m ready to use them.

But there wasn’t any room in the freezer.

No problem: I had an idea.

Banana salted vanilla caramel rolls.

Here they are before getting the caramel topping:

And again:

And after getting the caramel topping:

And again:

Again, that’s banana salted vanilla caramel rolls.

The main ingredient of note is banana.

The bread dough itself had a banana in it. The filling had a banana in it. And I made a salted banana-vanilla caramel – with two bananas in it – as a topping.

For the dough, I used this basic recipe for bread machine sweet dough. That’s right, I used a bread machine dough cycle to make the dough. I added the aforementioned banana and a small amount of instant coffee. I also added about a cup or so of extra flour – I eyeballed it – to account for the extra liquid from the banana. I also used a few tablespoons of aquafaba instead of the cornstarch-water-baking powder combination in the linked post.

I’ll have to consider a post about aquafaba at some point…fascinating stuff.

Anyway.

The filling was a mashed up banana, about half a cup of brown sugar, a packet of vanilla sugar, and some salt.

The caramel, which I added after baking and cooling, was kind of a random idea based on previous experience making a caramel-like filling for pecan pie.

For the caramel, I mashed two bananas into a smooth paste in a cooking pot, then added some sugar, salt, and vanilla sugar. I put the heat on low and cooked and stirred and cooked and stirred some more until the caramel was the right consistency. The right consistency was a when-you-know-it-you-know-it decision.

I let both the rolls themselves and the caramel cool overnight.

This is what the caramel looked like just before being spread on the rolls:

I just realized that there is batter splatter on my The Baking board in the photo. Said splatter has since been cleaned.

The banana caramel was the most experimental part of this recipe and also the part I’m most pleased with. Definitely a win.

Anyway, here’s the finished product one more time:

This recipe was the product of some imagination and a total of four bananas and it was absolutely delicious.

Absolutely bananas.

And for more banana bread content, check out some previous bakes:

Banana bread cake cones.

Experiments in banana bread.

Chocolate-chocolate chip bananana muffins.

Banana-blueberry muffins.

Bon appetit.