Week 12 Part IV

Banana Split Cake ☆☆☆☆☆ [pg 99 HFC]
As mentioned before in my blog, our family is not big on cake so I had skipped over this recipe several times in past years because it said cake in the title. Let me assure you that this is not cake. I think it should be titled Banana Split Dessert, but let's get on with the evaluation.

The dessert starts with a graham crocker crust, which is always a good start. The second layer is very simple and ends up being quite like pudding. Its ingredients are powdered sugar, butter, and egg blended together for 15 minutes. Wow, that seemed like a long time, but I assure you it is worth it.

Next layers are simply bananas and drained crushed pineapple. Now, regarding my whipped cream layer, I did not have a large tub of Cool Whip (which I assume is 12 ounces). My 8 ounce container had about 2/3 of the whip cream as the other part was used elsewhere. This did not bother me because I am not a huge fan of Cool Whip. Then there was the matter of the chocolate syrup. This is an item we always have on hand, but someone in our house has apparently been having ice cream lately and I found an empty chocolate syrup container in my fridge. GRRR.

Dessert shown with just caramel sauce. Chocolate sauce was
added the next day for our 8 person tasting test.

Right next to it though, was a brand new container of caramel sauce. Well, I reasoned, real banana splits have chocolate, caramel, and strawberry topping, so I opted to use the caramel. At first taste, I was very pleasantly surprised. This is not one of our usual types of dessert, but it was quite yummy.

The next day, I got chocolate sauce to add to the dessert, and later in the day we went to a friends to share the dessert. After the 8 person tasting panel was finished, it was decided this was a definite four star recipe and several indicated it to be a five star dessert. Our youngest taster, at the age of five, was allowed to have two helpings and she loved eating the layers off to get to the "cookie" at the bottom. Only one of our testers rated the dessert a three. They couldn't identify exactly what it was they didn't like but that was fine. There were plenty of volunteers willing to finish up his piece.

Today, I finished off the dessert and was lamenting that this recipe made such a large dessert, one that could easily be shared at a potluck, but it was probably too much for Tom and I to have around. As I savored the last few morsels, I realized each of the dessert ingredients could be easily cut in half and all that left over crushed pineapple can go on our next pizza. (A weekly meal at our house.) This will be great to have again this summer, a nice refrigerated dessert, made in an 8 x 8 for the two of us to share. Yum!