Bananas and Carrots and Dates! Oh My!

I guess it's fitting that I should start this off since this was my idea :) I LOVE this cake. I think it's been decided that this is more of a bread than a cake but no matter what you call it, it's delicious! The cake is dense and very rich.

I was lucky to have a buddy to bake with this month. Fellow HTC baker, Tori, came to visit this weekend so we decided to bake our cake together. I felt like I was prepared for the event for weeks and on the day of, I realized that I was missing a few key ingredients, mainly the carrots. Kind of important, no?

We set out all the ingredients and Tori wrote out the recipe on the kitchen chalkboard so we didn't destroy any paper with messy hands. Please note her artwork on the chalkboard! Tori mixed all the dry ingredients while I mashed up some dates for the paste. They were very easy to mash. If you've ever dealt with dates, they are incredibly sticky and have long pits inside which need to be removed. Tori was melting the butter for the dates to soak in and I got started on the bananas and carrots. A few weeks ago, another baker from the group, Gerri, gave me a great tip to freeze bananas that are going brown and can't be eaten at that time. I had a bunch frozen in the freezer that I mashed up and then put some carrots through the food processor.

We mixed everything together and stirred for a while. The batter is very thick. We spooned the whole thing into a square cake pan and into the oven to bake. If I remember correctly it baked for almost an hour. We set it out to cool for also around an hour. Had we stayed in the house and not gone out to get lunch, it would have cooled for 2 minutes before we cut into it.



Originally, we were going to frost half with cream cheese frosting and the other half with vanilla frosting. We ate about a 1/4 of the cake without frosting and then decided to see what it would taste like with the vanilla. I think I prefer it without but it definitely tasted more like cake with frosting. Can frosting really be bad? No.

There is a strong banana presence and can easily be called a banana bread with some carrots as opposed to a carrot cake. It's surprisingly sweet for a cake with no sugar. The dates definitely do their job. I love it. It's hearty, thick and filling.


The prep was fairly easy and it felt like we put it all together very quickly. I'm excited to make it again and possibly experiment with some other ingredients. I'm so glad I had a buddy to bake with this month and I look forward to hearing about all your baking experiences!