Banana Crunch Cake

On Sunday, a friend at church gave me some bananas that needed to be used up.   She is in the process of moving and does not yet have a functional kitchen in the new place.  I really wasn't sure I could find time to bake, but took the bananas anyway.  I was thinking of either muffins or a coffee cake, but was undecided (and uninspired).

I didn't get around to using the bananas until Tuesday and was just looking through recipes trying to find inspiration.  After a bit I remembered an old Quaker Oats cookbook I have.  This is a great little cookbook and I still use the meat loaf recipe from it, quite often.  I thought it just possible I might have seen a banana cake recipe in that book.

Sure enough!  In the dessert section, I found this:

Best of all,  the recipe didn't call for anything unusual that I didn't have on hand.  (If you need to enlarge the recipe, just click on the photo.  That should do it -- it did for me.)

One thing I appreciated while putting this together was that the ground oat flour was specified in an actual cup measurement.  Often, recipes will call for a certain amount of oats and have you grind them into flour in a blender.  I usually buy the Bob's Red Mill oat flour in a bag, so a recipe that requires starting with oats (and doesn't tell you how much oat flour you'll actually need) isn't too helpful.  For the all-purpose flour called for, I used the Bob's Red Mill 1-to-1 Gluten Free Baking Flour.  I didn't use the chopped nuts in the cake part, but did in the topping, since I had a couple tablespoons of toasted walnuts on hand.  I think another time I would use quick oats rather than old-fashioned in the topping, just to make it more attractive.

This cake was delicious the day I made it, but by the next day it was really fantastic.  Very moist and flavorful.

It was fun cooking from one of my older cookbooks!  I hope you'll give this recipe a try.  We enjoyed it very much!