Banana Pecan Cake with Peanut Butter Caramel Swirl

Sometimes a complete experiment turns out something altogether new. This cake for instance, I wanted to make some banana blondies then thought the peanut butter caramel from Veganomicon's 'Smlove Pie' swirled throughout would be yummy. I envisioned banana flavoured blondies, brownie like not too cakey with yummy caramel swirled throughout.....so I went creating what I thought was a cookie recipe but ended up with banana cake.

It is however one of the best banana cakes I've had, so not a total loss! As for the caramel.....I placed dollops of the caramel over the dough then swirled it in with a knife and baked it. It was very resistant to swirling in and stayed at the top. This resulted in it getting baked and losing the 'caramely'-ness I wanted it to have. But, again, it's still good! You get the taste of the peanut butter caramel on top, slightly crunchy which is nice. Oh, I also placed this in a much too small of tin - should have used a 9 x 13" pan not the 8" pan I did - hence the height of it :)

So, it's not what I went about making but still decided to blog it as it's good and I may still return to this - back to the drawing board!!

Makes about 16 squares:
115g vegan margarine
175g caster sugar
310g very ripe bananas, mashed well (about 3)
1 tsp baking soda
2 cups flour
1 tsp vanilla
1/8tsp salt
50g chopped pecans

Peanut Butter Caramel:
2 Tbsp + 2 tsp natural peanut butter
1 1/2 Tbsp maple syrup
1 Tbsp brown rice syrup

Prepare your pan and preheat the oven to 180C. Cream the margarine, sugar and vanilla until light and fluffy. Mix together the flour and salt and set aside. Mix the bananas and baking soda together and let sit a couple minutes. Stir this into the margarine mixture - it will go curdly, that's ok. Fold in the flour until it just comes together, fold in pecans. Spread into pan and even out the top.

For the caramel, place everything into a saucepan and heat up, stirring all the time until it is thick and falls like ribbons off a fork. Place dollops over the cake and swirl with a knife. Bake for about 30 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean. Let cool in the pan but it is nice warm too.

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