Easy Banana Cake With Maple Cream Cheese Frosting

This moist banana cake is perfect for using up 3 overripe, average-sized bananas. Ripe bananas are my favorite fruit to use in baked goods. Baked goods with banana take on such a lovely, rich banana flavor. Recipes like my Chocolate Chip Banana Bars, Zucchini Banana Bread and our Nutella Banana Muffins are some of my favorites.

If you love Nemo’s Cream Cheese frosted Banana Cakes, this recipe tastes VERY similar, but fresher! These cakes are ones that I would eat EVERYDAY when I worked at a convenience store. They were so amazing, so I set out to try and recreate them at home.

Ripe bananas are truly the best baking ingredients. Honestly, if you haven’t baked with speckly, slightly smooshy bananas you are missing out! Baked desserts with banana flavor are the best!!

This recipe requires 4 small ripe bananas, or 3 normal sized ones. Bananas that are green, or bright yellow are not optimal for a recipe like this. They are however good for recipes like these No-Bake Mini Banana Cream Pies.

For this recipe, I used a 9″ x 13″ Pyrex glass dish lined with parchment paper. Have you ever baked with parchment paper? I swear by this baking hack. All my breads and cakes are baked in parchment-lined pans for easy removal and cleanup. Plus, it also helps speed up the cooling time since the cake can breathe more easily once removed from the pan.

Chances are, at some point you have heard of brown butter or browned butter. While it might seem like some kind of fancy butter product, it is actually pretty simple.

To brown butter, and create browned butter is to simply add butter to a saucepan over medium heat. That in turn will melt down the butter, and it will bubble and slightly brown.

For this Maple Cream Cheese Frosting, I added the butter to a saucepan, and cooked it over medium heat for about 2 minutes until it started to bubble, and create brown bits in the bottom of the pan. Once it started to brown, I removed it from the heat immediately as to not create “burned butter”.

If you do not like nuts (like my kids) you can omit them.

Make sure you do not over mix this cake batter or it will not be fluffy, and it will turn out to be super dense.

This recipe is for a 9″ x 13″ cake. I used a parchment-lined Pyrex glass pan. If you do not like using parchment paper, you can grease your pan with nonstick spray.

Make sure to only use room temperature cream cheese for this recipe. If you do not, the frosting will be lumpy and gritty.

I used maple extract (similar to vanilla extract) for this recipe. However, YES, you can use vanilla extract for the frosting if you do not have maple. Additionally, you can enjoy this cake unfrosted, or just dusted with powdered sugar if you prefer to not frost it.

Allow this cake to cool for at least one hour at room temperature before frosting it.

This cake needs to be refrigerated since the icing does contain dairy products and does not have preservatives.

It will last up to 6 days when kept covered. You can heat in the microwave if you prefer it warm.