Banana-Chocolate Chip Cake with Peanut Butter Frosting

Every few months, my freezer fills up to the point where the door stops being able to fully close, and everything that’s stacked in the frozen cavern with no shelving comes tumbling out on top of me. After the second or third time this happens, I get exasperated enough to take stock of what’s inside. I’ll combine duplicate bags of nuts, admit I’ll probably never use those 10 remaining cranberries and throw out a hunk of salt pork I bought for a soup recipe and have been hopefully holding onto ever since. I’ll also always rediscover a bag of 5-10 frozen brown bananas.

During my most recent freezer excavation, things had gotten particularly bad and baking a banana bread was not going to make enough of a dent in my almost-rotten fruit stash. So I had to look a little harder. In the depths of the Bon Appetit archive from 2012, I found a recipe for a banana cake with chocolate chips and a thick slathering of peanut butter icing. It sounded like something you’d find at a bake sale in the 90s when peanuts were still welcome in schools, and frankly I loved the sound of it.

As with most baked goods with banana, this is a really easy cake to make. The hardest thing about it was actually tracking down the mini chocolate chips (they really need to be mini in order to blend into the dough), which my highbrow grocery story did not deign to carry (Gristedes to the rescue!). Once you’ve procured those, the cake comes together in a cinch, though if you’re like me it will take you a full afternoon to bake it because you only have one 8″x8″ pan and have to use it twice.

Things started to really take a turn towards the bake sale lifestyle when I decided to take (part of ) the cake to a friend’s house for dinner. Unfortunately, I ran out of time because I wanted to pick up the perfect bottle of wine at my favorite shop which is not remotely in my neighborhood. I came back, threw my things on the ground and whipped up the peanut butter icing at lightning speed. I then iced this cake like my life depended on it while watching the clock tick by, shouting instructions at my friend about what else we needed to bring. Like an overworked mother trying to prove she can do it all.

If you love the combination of bananas and peanut butter, which I ate on sandwiches every other day of my childhood, you will love this cake. It’s incredibly moist and dense and undeniably delicious. And, just kitschy enough to be fabulous.