I had it in my head that I wanted banana, maple syrup and salted caramel all wrapped up in a cake. To make sure the cake wasn’t tooth achingly sweet I took out a lot of the refined sugars because maple syrup is a liquid sugar, banana’s bring their own sweetness to the party and salted caramel is pure sugary goodness 😀















Too up the salted caramel even more I made a smooth rich salted caramel buttercream and drizzled even more caramel over the top! Indulgent enough for you?















The cake

The base of this cake is not too far away from your basic banana cake, all that is different is I replaced most of the sugar with maple syrup. Usually I would add around 200 grams (1 cup) of sugar but this time I used 160 millilitres (2/3 cup) of maple syrup and only 65 grams (1/3 cup) sugar instead and reduced the temperature of the oven by 25 degrees as maple syrup has a lower boiling point them sugar. I wanted to keep its flavour not just use it as a sweetener.















Also to help sweeten it up I added 3 small very ripe bananas, normally I would use large bananas as I am nuts for banana flavour, don’t believe me check out here, here, here and here! But I was conscious of how much liquid was being added to this batter, I wanted it to bake moist but still be fully baked all the way. And I still had the salted caramel swirl to think about.















Salted Caramel Crazy!

Like most of you I am addicted to this stuff the salty sweet combination is totally out of this world I use homemade but shop bought is really good these days. Originally I wasn’t going to put any frosting on this cake so I wanted my caramel in the cake. I took 5 very generous tablespoons and added it to the tin once the batter was just about to go in the oven.















Then swirled it all about.















This gave it lovely ribbons of caramel running through the cake.















Now I could have left it there, the first time I did and the cake was a lovely moist rich cake with all three flavours running through it.

Frosting

But the second time I made it I still had a little caramel left and used it up making a frosting for this cake and it va va voomed the cake out of this stratosphere!















The frosting was made with a little fresh cream to give it a lovely smooth richness and 3 more tablespoons of caramel were added. Talk about calorie laden!!!















All topped with a little caramel drizzle. High in calories? Yes but oh so good 😀















This cake is lovely with or without the frosting. It’s a moist banana sponge with a subtle hint of maple syrup and ribbons of caramel running through the cake batter.















The frosting just tops it off nicely to be a little more indulgent, either way this is a beautiful cake.