Banana Sheet Cake

By cnash

Ingredients

• 2 cups all purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter
• 1 cup white granulated sugar
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 2 eggs
• The scraped insides of one vanilla bean, or 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract
• 1 cup of mashed ripe bananas (2 large or 3 medium bananas)
• 1/2 cup full fat sour cream
• 6 ounces cream cheese, room temp
• 4 Tbsp (1/4 cup) unsalted butter, room temp
• 2 cups powdered sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 teaspoon lemon juice

Preparation

Step 1

Here's a tip, leave the cream cheese and butter for the frosting out while you make the cake, that way they will be softened by the time the cake is cooled and ready to frost. This cake is on the sweet side (it is a cake after all). If you are trying to cut sugars, you may want to experiment dropping the sugar in the cake mixture by a half cup and cutting the amount of frosting in half.

Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C) . In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, cinnamon, and salt.

Beat together in a mixer the butter and sugars. Beat in the eggs one at a time. Mix in the vanilla and mashed bananas.

Mix in half of the flour mixture, then the sour cream, then the other half of the flour mixture.

To make the frosting, mix all of the ingredients together with an electric mixer. If too stiff to spread, add a teaspoon or two of water. Spread the frosting evenly over the cake and slice to serve.

Makes 30 pieces.

YUM! Bananas AND cream cheese! Definitely sounds like a winner to me :D Can’t wait to try this out. Do you think the white sugar could be replaced using honey? Or would that affect the texture too much? (1/2 c. honey for example)

I haven’t had a lot of luck substituting sugar with honey in baking recipes. But I do think you can easily reduce the sugar in this recipe. If you do end up adding in some honey, please tell us how it works out for you. ~Elise

Instead of sour cream try replacing it with an equal amount of strawberry yogurt. The flavor is still banana, but this makes the best banana bread and cake you have ever eaten.

I love sheet cakes! I have made your banana bread recipe and put it in a square pan and it worked very well. Last week I experimented with a vanilla sheet cake recipe and made two sorts of frosting to go on top, one on each side. In the vanilla sheet cake I put a mixture of almond essence and vanilla essence. Added sour cream. For the frosting I made a peanut butter one and a vanilla one. Didn’t use any cream cheese. They were both good. I think this banana cake would be nice with a sour cream chocolate frosting on it which I have also used on a chocolate sheet cake recipe containing sour cream. You can also sub yogurt or buttermilk.

What’s the purpose of the sour cream in the cake mixture?

Makes it more moist and dense. ~Elise

Hi Mark, believe it or not, it’s a 10×15 pyrex that I’m using. It’s huge. The original recipe from Janeen calls for a 10×15 sheet pan which I don’t have, and her instructions called for 20-25 minutes. My cake was done at 20 minutes. If you are using a 9×13 pan, perhaps you’ll need an extra minute or two, but remember the cake cools in the hot pan once you take it out of the stove, so there will be quite a bit of residual heat. ~Elise

Yes, you can use a 9×13. You might want to add a minute or two to the cooking time. As for a square pan, yes again, though I’m not sure how much cooking time you would need to add. ~Elise

Banana cakes are so great. I usually make banana cream pies, but this looks very nice and simpler.

Sounds like a great recipe! If I wanted to add cocoa (I love chocolate and bananas together!), how much would you guess I should add? Thanks!

This recipe was easy and oh so delicious! I didn’t have sour cream so I used a container of pineapple Yoplait yogurt. I added about 1/2 cup of dried coconut to the batter and and another handful or so to the frosting…it came out fantastically.

Don’t know how well low-fat cream cheese works in frosting. When they make cream cheese low fat, they tend to put in fillers that may have an impact on the frosting. If you try it, please let us know in the comments how it turns out for you. ~Elise

I made the banana cake and brought it to a meeting. Everybody loved it and it was all gone pretty quickly! On a whim, as I added the lemon juice to the frosting, I also grated some of the lemon peel into it. Yum! I made it in a 9×13 pan and added about 5 minutes to the cook time.