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Hi everyone, I'm Claire Saffitz. Welcome to my home kitchen. As you may know, I am a contributor to New York Times Cooking and today I'm back with another recipe in collaboration with them. This is a recipe I've been thinking about for a long time. It is a banana sticky toffee pudding. So, it takes the classic British dessert and combines it with banana, which works so well because sticky toffee pudding has toffee and dates and I'm adding some walnuts for texture. It is just like the most comforting warm dessert I can possibly think of. It's really fun to make and if you want access to the recipe, you can get it using the gift link in the description below. So, I'm going to show you how to make it.
Sticky toffee pudding is a classic British dessert and it's made of a cake that's very moist from having lots of mashed up dates in it and very tender. You bake it in a baking dish and when it comes out of the oven, you pour this warm toffee sauce over the cake and it absorbs. And sometimes you see it cut into squares, sometimes it's just like scooped from the baking dish cuz the cake is so tender and it's just so delicious. And you can serve it with ice cream or whipped cream, so you get this temperature contrast.
It's so comforting and I was just like, why not add banana to it cuz banana goes well with every single component of the cake. And it also kind of contributes to that like tender moistness. Think of it like banana bread meets sticky toffee pudding. It's really good. So, I have ingredients that pull double duty cuz we have two components. Actually, three. And I didn't say this from the beginning, but I should have. It is an upside down banana sticky toffee pudding. There's an upside down layer where we have bananas on it. I basically turned sticky toffee pudding into a more fruit forward dessert, which I really like. So, we have three main components.
There's kind of like the banana layer, there's the batter, and then there's the toffee sauce. So, I'm starting with five ripe medium bananas. There's banana that go in the bottom of the pan. That's the upside down layer when you invert it. And then there's banana that's mashed up with the dates and added. So, I'm going to save my two ripest bananas for mashing. These bananas have been ripening on my countertop for like a week, but they were I went grocery shopping during the last snowstorm and I was like the only bananas were the absolute greenest ones and I had no choice.
I was like, "They'll ripen." But it's like they're still a little green. Not ideal. We'll do with it. For the cake, some dates, of course, some whole milk, all-purpose flour, dark brown sugar, two large eggs, a stick of butter, with the dry ingredients baking soda, baking powder, and kosher salt. I'm adding walnuts because I like the little crunch that you get in a texture. For the toffee sauce, we have some heavy cream, more dark brown sugar, more butter, more salt, and a little bit of vanilla. Special equipment, you will need a 9 by 9 square baking dish. So, I'm using a ceramic one here. You could use glass. You could use metal if that's what you have. And I've already lined it with parchment paper and greased it, which is neutral oil.
You'll need a saucepan cuz we're going to cook together that date mixture and get everything mashed up and smooth. And then the batter I'm going to make with a hand mixer. You could use a stand mixer with a paddle, but I have my hand mixer and just like a few bowls. You'll also need I have a behind me a little baking sheet, a quarter baking sheet. And that's because we're going to broil the bananas for that layer. The first thing we're going to do is get together our banana date mash. This is 4 oz of pitted Medjool dates. Those are the big ones that are like really nice and soft. So, I'm going to add that to my saucepan. So, we're using a saucepan to
cook this mixture, but also we're going to use it as the cake is baking to make the toffee sauce. So, we're going to hold on to that. I have a half a cup of milk. Sometimes you'll see water. That's like a common thing you'll in a classic sticky toffee pudding recipe, the dates are just kind of mashed in water. I'm adding a little bit of milk, which helps to enrich it. Sometimes you see it. Just a half a cup. I'm also going to add my baking soda. So, there's two leaveners, there's baking soda, baking powder. The baking soda doesn't actually really act as a leavener.
It helps to break down the sort of slightly more fibrous exterior of the dates, so that's smoother. So, I'm going to add that. And now I have to add my bananas. So, I have five bananas. Two of them are going to get mashed in and three are going to be are going to I'm going to leave to form the upside down layer. These are a little bit on the bigger side, so I need 7 oz of banana, which is about two medium. So, let's we're going to weigh it out. So, I'm just going to kind of break it into pieces as I'm weighing it out. This is a definitely a large banana, so I might
have a little more than I need. I always make a note like if I if there's ever a step in a recipe where you might have extra, I always leave a note that's like, "Freeze it for smoothies or just eat it or, you know, save it for something." Because sometimes it's just annoying to have like a little bit of it of an extra ingredient. Speaking of someone with a toddler, leftover bananas kind of gross. That's 7 oz. It's going to go in. So, we're going to bring it up to a simmer. I'm going to start to mash. We really want to break down the dates and the bananas, so you have a kind of coarse paste, nothing with like big whole pieces. Um and so, then I'll turn it down and kind of really gently simmer it and continue to mash.
Um and it just takes about 5 minutes after you hit that simmer to get everything together. So, this is going to thicken quite a bit, and this is what's going to add a lot of moisture into the cake. The dates have broken down and the bananas like fully mashed. Smells so, now we need to let this cool. And it gets a little bit foamy because of the baking soda. I'm going to set this aside so it can cool. So with my three remaining bananas, I'm going to slice off the stems. And I boil them in the skins. And that's because broiling will soften the bananas and it's so much easier to form that upside down layer and arrange them with the skins on. So it's kind of a fun trick.
I'll show you. You're going to cut them in half through the peel lengthwise. So we're going to get our halved bananas onto the baking sheet. Cut side up, obviously. And then we have this 1 Tbsp of brown sugar. The banana kind of chars and I like to let it get really dark. And then that char sort of like dissolves into the top layer of the cake. It's really nice. So it ends up being about like a half a teaspoon per banana half. Half a teaspoon? Yeah. Yeah, cuz it's 1 Tbsp, which is 3 tsp. And so per half, it's about a half a teaspoon. But it's plenty. It's plenty of sugar just to get a thin layer. Kind
of coating. And now I'm just going to kind of pat it into the surface. If I if the sugar was really clumpy, you can kind of massage it by rubbing. This is just to help distribute it. So these are ready to go. I'm going to stick them under the broiler and it's the kind of thing where it's like set a timer, don't walk away. Just keep an eye on it cuz they can burn fast. So I'm going to look. I'm going to stay down here. I'm going to set it for 1 minute and then check. But it's going to like bubble and look like a creme brulee surface. I'm going to let it go. Magic can start.
I'm going to pull it out. Take two, Mark. So, I just pulled these from the oven. They were in total for probably like a minute 20. The difference between nicely caramelized and burned is a few seconds. So, just be diligent. And now we are going to arrange these in our prepared pan. And you'll see why I left the skins on. So, let them cool until you can touch them. Then you're going to take a half one piece at a time and place it in the bottom of your pan. So, arrange them in any way that fits. And if you need to like cut them so that you have more like a quarter, then that's fine, too. However, you can get them to fit. And because the skins are on, like they're easy to move around.
So, if you need to like push them to a side trying to make some space. See how you just peel off that peel. And then I'm going to fit the last one right alongside. So, that's my banana layer. Definitely an extra step. You could skip this and only include the two bananas that are mashed in the recipe, but it looks so cool when it's turned out. And to me it makes it a little bit more of like an entertaining dessert because there's kind of a presentation element. Not that there isn't that for a sticky toffee pudding, but it's just more it could be very like homemade looking. This makes it just a little bit fancier. So, now we're ready to make the batter. And this part is really straightforward
and easy. We have the banana layer done. We have our banana date mixture and then it comes together easily. So, just a note. Once you're done broiling, you have to reduce your oven temp to 300°. This bakes kind of low and slow. It is a very high moisture cake. And the biggest pitfall or risk is under baking and having it be like raw batter, which I did the first time I made it cuz I was like, "Oh, it's done." But it's not. So, 300 and we're going to start by combining our dry ingredients. So, now some kosher salt and this is baking powder. That's our leavener. So, we're going to whisk this together. So, now we're going to combine our dark brown sugar
and one stick of butter. This butter is room temp. The batter has actually a lower proportion of butter in it, but we're going to soak it in this like extremely buttery toffee mixture. So, that's kind of by design. I'm using a hand mixer. You could use a stand mixer with a paddle. That'll go really fast. You could also do it by hand. If you have like a little bit of patience, you can cream this by hand and it'll be fine. So, we want to cream this together until it's pale and fluffy. I have my two eggs also room temp. Everything's ready to go. When I say we want it to be pale and fluffy, this is pale because when you start with dark brown sugar it's very dark. So, that has lightened in color.
We're going to add our eggs one at a time. So, I'm going to alternate wet and dry. So, I'm going to do about a third of the dry and then two additions of wet alternating. Our wet ingredients in this case are the date and banana mixture. So, once the flour disappears, we can add half of our banana date mixture. Once that's incorporated, I'll add half of the remaining flour or a third of the total. And this makes a really thick batter.
Okay, then the last addition of wet We're going to scrape down our beaters. And now I need to mix this and need to really scrape the bottom and the sides to make sure everything's evenly mixed. What I'm I'm going to do it with the walnuts in there. So I can get those distributed. And now everything just needs to get folded together really, really well. Scraping the bottom and sides, make sure everything is evenly mixed. You could do another nut, you could do pecans, that would be really delish. That is your choice or you could omit them. But if you omit them, just still make sure that you're giving the batter a really good mix. Now we're going to pour our batter into the pan over the bananas.
And it's a really thick batter, so like you're not going to do too much to disturb the bananas, but I like to kind of pour it into the gaps just to make sure that thick batter has a chance to kind of fill in those spaces and come into contact with the pan. So then smooth this in an even layer all the way to the corners and four sides. This is ready to go into the oven and it's going to bake until the surface is going to be browned and cracked. The cracking is really important, that let that lets you know that it's baked fully through and that it's not like underbaked. It can be deceiving cuz sometimes where the if you hit a banana, the tester will come out clean, but it's not really done. So make sure you look for that
cracking and we're going to test it in a bunch of different places, but the range is 45 to 55 minutes. The cake is almost done baking. We took a quick break for lunch, but now I want to pivot quickly to make the toffee sauce. And this is just like a 5-minute thing. Because the idea is the cake comes out and it's done we pour a portion of the warm toffee sauce over the cake. So, I'm going to start by I've 3/4 of a cup of heavy cream. I'm going to throw in kosher salt. And then one stick of butter. I'm going to get this over the heat. We're going to bring it to a boil on medium-high. And we're making a toffee sauce. So, we're not making candy or toffee
itself. Toffee sauce is really just these ingredients boiled together until they're like slightly thickened and that's it and the sugar is dissolved. That's really the most important part. There isn't so much of a well-defined end point here. You just want everything combined brought to a boil, sugar dissolved. So, we're going to stir to dissolve the sugar and melt the butter. So, once this comes to a boil, we're going to reduce the heat to maintain like a low boil or a vigorous simmer and just cook it kind of swirling or stirring a few times until it's slightly thickened and then that's it. You're done. We're going to take it off the heat, add the vanilla.
And while this is boiling, I'm going to check my cake which has been baking for almost 50 minutes. And see if that's done. All right, so this is at a boil. That's a good kind of level of boil. I'm going to reduce the heat. Let's check the cake. So, I'm going to grab a cake tester and we're going to look at it in a couple different places. It's not done. All right, now it's not done yet. The center is like a little bit sunken. So, I know that it's under baked in the center. So, we're going to let it go. So, we want this to stay warm for pouring over the cake. When it's done
bubbling, I'm going to just keep it on super low. I'll add the vanilla extract and then it can sit here until the cake is ready. It should be soon. It smells so good in here. I can't tell if it's the toffee or the cake. I think it's the cake. But I think it's done. So that the top is nicely domed. It's cracked in places and golden brown. So I'll take it, but we'll test it just to make sure. So this has gone toward the high end of the range like a little over 55 minutes. It's golden brown and I'm just going to test it in a few different places to make sure the cake tester is clean. So the yield on the toffee sauce is around
1 and 2/3 cups. We're going to take 2/3 of a cup, so a little less than half of the toffee sauce and pour it over top. But first we want to poke a bunch of holes. And that is to help the cake like pull the sauce into the crumb. You could use a cake tester, but the cake tester is really thin, so I'm using like a skewer. Where I noticed that where my cake was really underbaked where I was like doing this and like I was pulling the toothpick out and it was like covered in batter. Oops. But this is good. So this part I'm going to eyeball. The idea is that you're using some of the sauce to soak the cake and some of it you're reserving for serving cuz you want to give it like a little extra puddle on the plate.
One of the great pleasures of sticky toffee pudding is that it's served warm. Warm cake is the best cake. And you can kind of brush it over top. So we want to let this cool just really until it's warm and the cake has had a chance to like pull. You can see it's already pulling the sauce into the crumb. About 15 minutes and then we're going to unmold it cuz we want to see that really pretty banana layer on the bottom become the top and then we're going to serve and taste. Oh my gosh, it's still hot. We're going to turn it out anyway. So we're going to turn this out and remove the parchment so you can see the banana layer cuz it needs to be served upside down. But you can't just turn it out onto a
rack because there's like drips from the toffee. So you need to find a platter that will fit. So, I'm going to use this large round one. And is it hot enough for me to touch it? Yeah. I mean, it's warm enough. So, we're just going to go Be sure to loosen the sides that don't have the parchment. I did not do that. So, let's see the reveal. Ooh, the caramelized banana like kind of bled into the cake and you get this nice beautiful caramelized layer. I like to give it a little hit of the toffee sauce over the whole thing. It just like glazes it and gives it a little shine. Now, let's cut a
slice and taste it. So, this is a very rich intense dessert. So, I think that the squares should be cut in 3 by 3. So, it serves nine. Even that's like pretty generous. So, I'm going to cut a little piece. And when it's warm, the cake is still so tender. Such a delicate crumb with just like the toffee sauce bleeding into it. Then just to serve optional, but give people as much toffee sauce as they want. I feel like with it being warm and with all the toffee sauce, it's like I'm good. You could add some unsweetened whipped cream, but there's already cream in the toffee. So, it's really up to you. The contrast with something cold is nice. So, if you want vanilla ice cream or whipped cream, that's nice. But I'm just going to eat
it as is. I just think it looks so good, so tender. And even though the point of sticky toffee pudding is that it's warm and soft, I do like the walnuts in there for just like a little bit of crunch. Plus like walnuts and dates and banana, it all goes together. Mhm, it really is like gives banana bread, but also sticky toffee pudding. Banana bread and sticky toffee pudding to get together make this, which is such a comforting dessert. It's fun to serve to a group. You can do like the sauce, and then people can like top it themselves. It's super delicious, but it
is also kind of like a snacking cake. So, if you want to make this and you have leftovers, what happens is the butter and the toffee sauce will harden, and so it will solidify. So, just rewarm it gently. You can do it in the oven, you can do it in the microwave, however you want. Just a really, really fun spin on a classic. So, if you want to look at the full recipe, you can get the link in the description below. There's no paywall, so you can access it for free. I really hope you check it out and make it. Thank you so much for watching. Don't forget to like and subscribe.
