For absolutely no reasons other than I Wanted It and It Sounded Good and Also I Had Two Sad Bananas and Didn’t Want To Make Banana Bread, earlier this fall I got really caught up in making sticky toffee banana puddings, except by pudding I mean British for cake or sometimes a steamed cake and sometimes just the dessert course entirely (did I do this right? please help your confused American friend). Sticky toffee pudding is usually made with dates and almost every person I’ve ever told that to who has had it but doesn’t peruse recipes for fun and entertainment (crazy!) has found that baffling, but indeed, there are dried dates that have been soaked and blended until smooth and added to a lightweight brown sugar and butter cake that is ladled — I mean, truly soaked — with a warm toffee/butterscotch sauce and an enormous spoonful of unsweetened whipped or clotted cream and sometimes sprinkled with a few flakes of sea salt and it’s just unbelievably, unforgettably decadent.

This is that, but for bananas. Yet this is resolutely, indignantly not banana bread. There is no cinnamon nor nutmeg. I wanted this to taste like a cozy winter cake so there’s dark brown sugar, vanilla, and even a spoonful of molasses or treacle for extra gravitas, trust me, it works here. It’s blissful with the sauce and the cream and, no matter what else you make on New Years Eve, be the only thing people are still talking about the next day. (I mean, unless your behavior is particularly legendary, in which case, the cake will happily cede the spotlight.)

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