Salty Tahini Banana Upside Down Cake

an any-time-of-day cake that bakes in its own caramel-esque topping

Heyyo!! Coming to you in between my and Michaela’s bachelorette in Maine and my dear friend since we were little’s bachelorette in Puerto Rico. Will share more deats next week!

I also revisited and slightly updated my birthday cake blondies recipe, one of my most popular recipes. I reposted the video

In the meantime…

Recommendations

• 🎶New baking tunes: I got two new records recently, recommended by the owner at Sounds Good records in Andes in the Catskills. They’ve become my new baking soundtrack, giving off a calm but exuberant energy that exactly matches my vibe when I bake. I’m assuming you feel (or want to feel) the same when you bake. Plug these in on Spotify here and here, or purchase on vinyl here and here. Let it roll, measure some flour, and be freeeee!!

the vinyls! per the post-it, these are also great with morning coffee or evening wine

• 🍰The cinnamon roll at Thea: Thea is our local neighborhood bakery, under the same ownership of Miss Ada and Theodora, two outstanding Israeli-Mediterranean restaurants that helped put Fort Greene on the ‘we have great restaurants’ map. Thea is making a distinct name for itself though, drawing a bunch of acclaim since it opened last year. Michaela and I went a couple weekends ago and tried their new cinnamon roll. It is excellent and unique within the NYC cinnamon roll fanfare. Crispy outsides and gooey insides, bursting with cinnamon flavor in a way that only a spice-forward Israeli bakery can do, with a thick blanket of a slightly salty powdered sugar glaze.

  • I have no photos of this roll, because we went during our engagement shoot. But when we get the pics from the shoot, I shall share our exuberant faces as we took our first bite!!

This week’s recipe

I’ve been thinking about a banana upside down cake since seeing David Lebovitz’s recipe for one. I wanted to take a slightly nutty approach to the cake, though, and went with reliable ole TAHINI. I have friends who call me out for making too many recipes with tahini, but we don’t succumb to peer pressure in this house!!

I tried hard to make the cake very tahini-forward in flavor - amping it up a lot in the topping, and using it in place of oil in the cake batter - but this compromised the caramelization of the topping and the springiness of the cake. SO the tahini is coming through more subtly. But after trying and obsessing over Morning’s chocolate chip caramel miso cake in the Catskills last month, and realizing it was delicious even though the miso and caramel were quite subtle, I feel comfortable with the tahini playing a more delicate role here.

For those who have not made an upside-down cake before, which I assume is most of us because it’s not the 1950s, it’s a delicious cake that bakes in it’s own caramelized, sticky-sweet topping. A huge benefit is that you don’t need frosting, so you get 2 recipes for the time investment of one.

To make this cake, you cook tahini, brown sugar and butter in a cast-iron skillet until bubbly, layer on sliced bananas, and then pour the cake batter on top. So it all bakes in one big ole skillet. When the cake is just slightly cooled from the oven, you turn it over and get a beautiful geometry of banana slices and sticky, caramelized tahini topping.

The cake is great for any time of day. It’s a delightful cake to bring to a dinner party, to enjoy as an afternoon snack, or to eat as a chill and unique birthday cake.

A few baking notes:

• Unlike with banana bread, you want perfectly yellow bananas here, NOT brown and spotty bananas. Since you’re getting thin slices of banana on top of the cake, you don’t want the banana to be mushy.

• The cake batter is more akin to a layer cake than a quickbread like banana bread. This is what helps make the cake perfectly springy and moist. Because of this, I give you a few more directions than you get in a quickbread. Just a HEADS UP.

• I wrote this recipe to all be made in a 10-inch cast iron skillet to reduce dishes. But you can also assemble the cake in a 9x9 or 9x13-inch pan; the former will give you a thicker cake, latter thinner.

• This cake is best enjoyed warm. You can make it ahead of time, and heat it up in the oven before serving. It’s great with a scoop of vanilla ice cream or, like I did, with a dollop of tangy Greek yogurt.

Salty Tahini Banana Upside-Down Cake

Serves 10-12