Bears. Beets. Battlestar Galactica. Almost weird how the ‘B’ alliteration made a reappearance with this dessert.

Still catching up, this past month, I wanted to try something a little bit more experimental. I wanted to create something new, using my tastebuds as a guide. Using banana bread seem to be a pretty safe point to start. I was partially inspired by a friend who made a similarly themed cake (hers looked a lot prettier though).

Anyway, so I made a brûléed black sesame banana cake.

Why black sesame?

It’s not tahini but I still had a good pouch of it left from the time I made black sesame cream puffs. I never considered myself to be a fan of sesame but the flavor grew on me. The nice earthy nuttiness of black sesame is something that I figured would also pair really nicely with something like bananas.

Why brûléed?

Why not.

How did it go?

Not horrible?

The basic recipe that I used for the banana bread base was from Sally’s Baking Addiction. Putting together the batter was a no brainer.

The tricky part was how much black sesame paste to add to the mashed bananas. I wish I took better notes at this part but I basically just followed my tastebuds. Adding more black sesame when I could barely taste it above the bananas or adding more bananas for dilution when the black sesame nuttiness was enough to trigger a minor allergic reaction on my tongue (that was fun). Eventually, I found a happy medium where the banana flavor was dominant with nice after-notes of black sesame. It looked like an unappetizing gray with splotches of yellow but I ignored that. I mixed it into the batter.

Even before I placed it in the oven, I taste tested the raw batter (not looking to win any food safety awards here) and noticed that the other dry/wet ingredients diluted the black sesame flavor again. In haste, I added some last minute drops of black sesame to the batter in the cake pan.

Since I was only making a half batch of this recipe, this cake/bread finished baking at 35 minutes. The first thing I noticed was that, you can clearly see where I added last minute black sesame so it had a little gray top. Not that that really mattered since I was already planning to saw off the top anyway. I put the cake in the fridge to be topped off tomorrow.

After letting the cake chill overnight, I cut off the top layer, revealing that it was actually a little underdone, which was good since I was planning to put the cake in for a second time under the broiler. The cake scraps tasted mostly like banana with the sesame a little muted. I think I could’ve added even more sesame.

I topped off the cake with a generous smearing of the black sesame banana puree leftover from yesterday…which didn’t look too great but I didn’t know what else to do with it. I cut two small bananas lengthwise and placed them on top as a decoration and sprinkled a bit of brown sugar all over the top of the cake.

I was nervous about broiling it since I’ve never broiled anything to brûlée something before. But alas, I don’t have a blowtorch anymore so this was the only option I had. I moved an oven rack to the top and placed the cake at the top near the broiler. I let it broiled for 5 minutes, rotating it once at the 3 minute mark.

The end result showed that I broiled something! The brown sugar bubbled and burned really nicely onto the bananas, but I couldn’t tell if anything was really brûléed on the puree part because it was pretty dark. One cool thing that I didn’t expect was that the broiler made the sides sort of crispy with some cool burnt marks on the edges. I always appreciate a little texture diversity.

The taste was alright. A majority of the black sesame taste came from the puree topping, making me think that maybe black sesame just gets baked out? I think I need to spend more time nailing the proportions of banana to black sesame. It tasted like a nice banana bread but nothing too special. I also think that I could have been more generous with sprinkling brown sugar on top to allow better caramelization. It also tasted better the second day when the puree had enough time to soak into the cake.

Overall, I think a good attempt was made. I just thought it was cool to actually try to riff and make something new, not totally strictly based on a recipe. Maybe I’ll revisit this in the future.