Salted Caramel Banana Cake

plus banana bread cold brew & banana nutella muffins

happy friday! here’s what’s new (& updated) on fresh bean bakery this week (it’s accidentally very banana-y) -

salted caramel banana sheet cake

I know we’re a bit far from the first day of fall but I am very ready for allll the fall flavors so I hope that you are as well. I think that this cake is a good transition cake into fall flavors, because it’s not really full-on pumpkin spice or anything like that, but for some reason salted caramel and banana feel like fall flavors to me.

This cake starts with a *super* moist banana sheet cake that has a bit of cinnamon and walnuts in it. And honestly it’s super delicious all by itself, but we’re topping it with a super creamy, flavorful and delicious salted caramel cream cheese frosting, and then swirling it with *even more* salted caramel sauce to make it pretty on top.

banana bread cold brew

If you love banana bread and wish you could have the flavor of it every single morning, I made this coffee for you. This cold brew takes alllll the delicious flavors of banana bread and wraps them up nicely into this banana bread cold brew. It starts with a super easy simple syrup that’s made up of water, brown sugar, cinnamon, butter extract, vanilla extract, and your favorite banana bread nut (I used walnuts!)

Once you get the syrup made, you’ll add a bit of it to your cold brew, and then we’ll make a super easy and delicious banana bread cold foam with the syrup, heavy whipping cream and banana milk. And yes, I do mean banana milk and it does exist! I think it really brings the whole drink together but you only need a small amount (1 tbsp.) for the recipe so you can just replace it with regular milk if you’d like.

small batch banana nutella muffins

This recipe got a *big* update on the blog! It was originally published in 2022 and was in desperate need of a picture update and I decided I wanted to change up the recipe a bit as well. First off, these used to be called “one banana brown butter banana muffins” which is just a whole mouthful of words and was not doing the recipe any justice for getting searched up online. Originally, they were also just swirled with a tiny bit of nutella on top, but I wanted to make the nutella a bigger part of the recipe - so now they are *stuffed* with a whole lot of nutella (see above!). I also made a few minor adjustments to the flour and sour cream amounts so they’re even more moist - and now they’re made with mini chocolate chips instead of regular sized chocolate chips, because mini chocolate chips are better for getting some chocolate in every single bite.

Buuut overall, these are super delicious and they’re perfect for using up that last banana sitting on your counter. Aaand if you don’t have any bananas right now, you can buy a bunch this weekend and make all these recipes next weekend :)

..aaand that’s all for this week! Thank you so much for reading and following along!

happy baking!
♡ erin