I made Food52's Banana Upside Down cake and wasn't terribly impressed. I made the recipe per instruction with two additions - some rum added to the brown sugar and butter before being entirely cooked off and 1/2tsp cinnamon added to the batter - and while I liked the overall idea of the thing and the crust produced baking in a skillet was great, but it had issues with texture, flavor, and preparation.
Issues I had include:
- Texture. It's less of a cake and closer to bread pudding. The best upside down cakes I've had were closer to a quick bread in consistency.
- It's not sweet enough. The amount of brown sugar on the topping doesn't compensate for the lack of sugar in the recipe.
- My bananas ended up ludicrously tough. This may have been an issue of using underripe bananas, though they seemed okay when I ate one.
- It's bland and - due to the huge volume of buttermilk - sour. This was with the added cinnamon.
- The topping was not liquid enough, though I might have just overdone it cooking out the rum.
Proposed amendments include:
- Swapping the butter and brown sugar for a cooked sugar caramel similar to tarte tatin. I've had excellent banana tarte tatins before, and this is not so different.
- Using a lower liquid volume and less oil or perhaps switching to butter entirely. Maybe just use a quick bread batter and see how it goes?
- Adjusting the recipe to use a 9" cast-iron cooking pot would allow for a taller cake, which I would prefer.
- Adding a rum syrup after baking (it's upside down anyway) as per rum cake would be nice.
Any ideas?
