The Best Banana Cake Recipe (2024)

This is the best easy, moist banana cake recipe, and it’s made completely from scratch! My recipe is perfectly balanced with extra bananas and complementary spices and it’s crowned with a silky smooth cream cheese frosting. This is the snack cake of yourdreams!

An Easy, MOIST Banana Cake Recipe

This banana cake recipe is a result of many, many emails and comments from so many of you writing to tell me how much you enjoyed my banana muffins(see, I didn’t call them the “best” for nothing).

A few of you wrote to ask me if it would be possible to bake the muffin recipe into a banana cake, but I had a few reservations. I was worried that the original recipe wouldn’t make the best banana cake, and so I started recipe testing to develop the perfect moist cake.

I went through alot of overripe bananas (and some not-so-ripe ones, in moments of desperation), and finally ended up modifying my pumpkin cake (of all things) to land on this winning banana cake recipe. It’s incredibly soft, fluffy yet moist, and topped with a smooth and creamy version of my popular cream cheese frosting (though to make things extra decadent try it with my brown butter frosting!).

Let’s get started:

🧂 Ingredient Overview

My banana cake recipe was carefully and intentionally designed to be sweet, simple, super flavorful, and moist. There are a few key players that help make this happen. For those of you interested in the thought behind the ingredients, let’s discuss:

• Bananas. For the best flavor & moistest cake, you should use ripe, spotty, brown bananas. Have some that are looking a little overripe on your counter and starting to attract fruit flies? Grab those. Ideally I prefer mine to be browner than the too-yellow ones shown in the photo above (but my recipe is versatile, so use what you have on hand!). King Arthur has a great guide on choosing the best bananas to use.
• Butter AND oil. Those of you who have made my vanilla cake or marble cake recipe know that a blend of the two yields a better cake than simply using all butter or all oil. All-butter cakes are more dense and dry than all-oil ones, but using all oil mean you lose that precious buttery flavor. For my banana cake recipe I sought balance, and a blend of the two yielded a perfect moist cake. For the oil, any neutral cooking oil (canola or vegetable are most common) will work.
• Sugar. Another best-of-both-worlds scenario. Granulated sugar adds sweetness without weighing the cake down too much, while brown sugar adds depth of flavor. Light or dark brown sugar will work, but dark brown sugar makes the cake a bit richer and sweeter.
• Leavening Agents. Baking powder and baking soda are welcome additions here, they add a bit of lift to the cake to make it perfectly fluffy. Without the two of them we’d have a dense, gummy cake. .
• Buttermilk. While this plays a role in helping the banana cake to rise a bit when combined with the baking soda, more importantly it adds moisture and a very subtle tangy flavor. You may use my buttermilk substitute if you can’t find buttermilk in stores (or just don’t have any), but the “real” stuff is best here.

This is just an overview of a few of the main ingredients I used and why. For the full recipe please scroll down to the bottom of the post!

How to Make the Cake Layer

1. Use a potato masher or fork (or even a mixer) to mash the bananas, eliminating as many lumps as you can (you won’t get all of them, that’s OK!).
2. Beat together the sugars and butter until light, creamy and well-combined. Then, stir in your oil until it’s incorporated.
3. Add the bananas to the butter/sugar mixture and stir well to combine.
4. Add the eggs, buttermilk, and vanilla extract and stir well. The batter most likely won’t be smooth since your mashed bananas are bound to be a bit lumpy, but everything should be thoroughly mixed.

5. In a separate bowl whisk together the dry ingredients.
6. Add the flour mixture to the wet mixture gradually. You want the ingredients to be thoroughly combined, but as with my banana bread, over-mixing can result in dense, dry results. One of the things that helps keep this banana cake recipe so moist and perfectly textured is being sure to not overdo it when combining the wet and dry ingredients. Either fold them together by hand using a spatula, or use an electric mixer on low-speed and stir until just-combined.
7. Spread the batter evenly into a greased 9×13″ baking pan. I use a metal pan, if you use a glass one note that your cake will take longer to bake than indicated.
8. Check the doneness of the cake by inserting a toothpick into the center. The toothpick should come out mostly clean, or, preferably, with some moist crumbs (but no raw batter!).

How to Make Banana Cake Frosting

The other day someone commented to me that they’d eat shoe leather if it had cream cheese frosting on it. That resonated with me 😂. Cream cheese frosting complements everything, and it was a no-brainer that this was the perfect choice for when developing the BEST banana cake recipe. Fortunately, it’s also very easy to make:

1. Combine (softened, full-fat) cream cheese, butter, vanilla extract, and salt and beat until smooth and creamy. There should be no lumps remaining (if it’s lumpy, your cream cheese may have been too cold).
2. With mixer on low speed, add the powdered sugar in small increments until it is all mixed in.
3. Add the cream gradually while increasing the speed of your mixer from low to high. Beat on high-speed for 30 seconds (this helps whip some air into the frosting, making it smooth but also stable) and you’re finished!
4. Spread the frosting over the (cooled) cake. Top with regular or toasted pecans or walnuts (or a drizzle of caramel sauce or dulce de leche 🤤) for a finishing touch!

Frequently Asked Questions

It took quite a bit of tweaking and testing but I’m very proud to finally be sharing my favorite banana cake recipe with you. If you try it, please leave me a comment letting me know how you liked it!

Enjoy!

Let’s bake together! Make sure to check outthe how-to VIDEO in the recipe card!

More Banana Recipes to Try!

This banana cake recipe was first published March 2018. The recipe remains unchanged, but the content of the post has been updated to include more helpful information as well as a how-to video tutorial.