I get asked for this recipe all the time and I never want to give away the secret -  Banana Cake

With the holidays approaching, we all want the easiest, most delicious, inexpensive, and the most beautiful recipes, don’t we?

That’s not asking for a whole lot, is it?
So many of our favorite traditions revolve around food.

The smell of that succulent turkey roasting, the baking gingerbread that Grandma used to make every Christmas Eve, snuggling around the crackling fireplace after caroling with my whip cream dolloped hot chocolate mug nestled between frigid fingers are just a few ways that my senses are stimulated.

It’s amazing how instantly I am brought back to those special moments by just an aroma.
I can’t wait to spend some time sharing our traditions around food, and I’ll invite you to share some as well…..but that’s for another post. 🙂

This is a new recipe for me this holiday season of 2008, and I am thinking it may become the start of a timeless tradition. Certainly one that will not be regulated to the “holiday” box, but one that may become a once a week kind of tradition.
Typically, I am not a box mix kind of gal when it comes to company, but after this success, I may never again go back to scratch. ha

You probably have all the ingredients in your cupboard right now, so don’t procrastinate.

If you start thrifting like I have been telling you to, you might have an adorable pan like this just calling your name from the back of the cupboard.

Yes, the difference between a yummy tasting cake, and a yummy tasting cake which turns into eye candy, is this $1 pan that I picked up a few weeks ago when I was out treasure hunting.
I know, I know, aren’t they adorable?
I served these for breakfast with no frosting and called them banana bread….hee hee
Can I tell you how moist and melt in the mouth marvelous they were?
Did I tell you that this only took less than five minutes of “work”?
The above pictures shows a “do as I say, not as I do.”
I didn’t wait for it to cool completely. I was too excited to make some eye candy . Lack of patience = glass with steam……. 🙂
I split the batter in half between the mini bundt cakes, and a 9 inch round pan.
Frost the cake with my Easy Cream Cheese Frosting Recipe.  Spread top with frosting.
If you have used a 13 x 9 pan, then cut cake crosswise in half. Frost the top of one, and then top with remaining cake half and repeat by frosting top and sides. You can press nuts onto the sides or sprinkle with chocolate jimmies. If you are doing this at Christmas time, then green and white sprinkles would be pretty as well.
No lie – I was so excited to photograph a food post from start to finish, but by the time I went to take the picture of the finished frosted product, this is what I found.
Yep, it was a hit, and truly, the frosting is not even needed.

But just in case you need the “finished product” pictures, I had fun searching through Country Living. They came through for me, and theirs look almost as nice as mine.
Too bad you couldn’t see my masterpiece….wink, wink.
I love the simplicity of the powdered sugar.

Here they used chocolate cake and inverted two of my mini cakes to form pumpkins…too cute.
Really, I almost thought of that.

small chocolate pumpkin cakes
Charles Schiller

Yep, this is what mine looked like with the cream cheese frosting.

Even a little bedlam made it into the picture by a bowl-licking Lab named Lola.