This is a moist delicious coffee cake with just a hint of banana, a cinnamon oat pecan streusel, and a vanilla drizzle. Perfect, whether you like bananas or not!
OK. So I don’t LOVE bananas. I usually eat one every morning because it’s good for me. I have diabetes, there’s some dodgy heart issues lurking about…basically, a banana has lots of good stuff in it that I’m supposed to put inside of me. But unless they’re barely ripe and not the least bit squishy, I just can’t. I also can’t seem to eat them before they turn brown. What to do? I can’t be throwing away perfectly good (from a nutritional standpoint) food and no one else in my house seems to eat them, so I figured out a way to put those brown spotted beasts in a coffee cake so that it barely even tastes like banana!! HaHa! Fooled myself! So tricksy! And it’s DELICIOUS!
Next hurdle. Probably the most challenging part of making cakes and cupcakes, for me, is creaming the butter and the sugar. Sounds easy, right? What’s the problem? Well, how soft should the butter be? No one ever really defines that. When I watch a video or look at a recipe, my butter/sugar mix NEVER looks like that. So after much Googlification, I came across a reference to reverse creaming! Sounds weird and complicated, I know, but it couldn’t be simpler. You just put all your dry ingredients together; flour, sugar, leavening agents, and mix in your butter or oil (whatever fat is called for) until it looks like cornmeal or damp sand. Then you add your wet ingredients; milk, eggs, vanilla, etc, until combined. That’s it!
So, let’s apply that mind-bending technique to my Sour Cream Banana Coffee Cake! C’mon! I believe in you!
Pandemic Pantry Tips:
I ran out of sour cream, but I have Greek yogurt. It’s a one-for-one sub. Just use the yogurt!
Don’t have pecans? Use walnuts, almonds, or no nuts. Go nuts! Or not.
Ingredients
Dry Ingredients
- 2 1/2 cup cake flour
- 1 1/2 cup granulated sugar
- 2 tsp baking powder
- 1/2 tsp baking soda
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 1 1/2 stick unsalted butter
Wet Ingredients
- 1 cup sour cream
- 2 Bananas, mashed
- 1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
- 3 extra large eggs
Streusel Ingredients
- 1/4 cup packed brown sugar
- 1/2 cup all purpose flour
- 2 tsp cinnamon
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 1/2 cup whole oats
- 1 cup chopped pecans
- 4 tbsp cold unsalted butter, cut in cubes
Glaze Ingredients
- 2 tbsp cream cheese, whipped is best!
- 2 tbsp heavy cream
- 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
- 1 cup powdered sugar
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour a tube pan.
- Let's start with the streusel. In a food processor, pulse sugar, flour, cinnamon, and salt until fully combined. Add butter cubes and pulse 2-3 times until butter is broken up into pea sized and smaller pieces. Pour into a bowl and mix in the oats and chopped pecans. Set aside and don't pick at it. Maybe a little.
- Sift all the dry ingredients together and mix for one minute in stand mixer. Add butter and mix until the texture of cornmeal or damp sand.
- Whisk together all the wet ingredients. Add to dry ingredients and mix on medium speed until fully incorporated, about 1 minute. At this point, I always use a rubber spatula and give everything a good stir. Stand mixers sometimes miss bits on the bottom, and we want to get all the good stuff together. So give it a few stirs. Thanks.
- Pour 3 cups of the batter evenly into the pan. Sprinkle with 3/4 cup of the streusel. Pour over the remaining batter and sprinkle the rest of the streusel on top. Bake for 50-60 minutes or until toothpick comes out clean.
- Cool for 30 minutes on wire rack. Transfer cake, streusel side up onto cake plate (I cover the top with foil to "contain" the streusel and use a plate to flip it out, them flip it back over onto a cake plate). Let cool about 30 minutes. In the meantime, mix the glaze ingredients together. You might need a 3rd tbsp of cream to get it to a good drizzly consistency. Try 2 tbsp and see how you feel and add more if you want it a little more drizzly. Use a fork to spritzle it all over the cake. You're done! Cut it up and eat it. It's gonna be great!