Yellow Cake Mix Banana Bread

Even though I follow tips to store bananas so they stay good longer, every once and a while they go past their prime. And then you know what time it is: time to make banana bread.

However, recently I didn’t have a lot of time to bake but I did have store-bought box cake in my pantry. So I played around with a recipe for making banana bread with yellow cake mix. Boy oh boy were the results great.

Yellow Cake Mix Banana Bread

If you’ve never heard of dump cakes, you don’t know what you’re missing. The notion of making a dump cake is this: you literally dump all of the ingredients in the pan you’ll be baking your cake in — or in my instance, yellow cake mix banana bread. Then you mix all the ingredients together, pop it in the oven and you get easy peasy banana bread.

To be clear, I didn’t have a loaf pan on hand when I decided to try this recipe. So I used a 13 X 9 Le Creuset cake pan casserole dish. I’m not surprised that the end result looked more like a cake than a loaf of bread. But, sometimes, looks don’t really matter when it comes to delicious food.

I had a feeling that using cake mix to make this recipe would turn out well. Because I know that when trying to make box cake mix taste better, adding ingredients like bananas is one of the things you’re supposed to do. Well, I did that plus chocolate chips. I’m telling you, you’ll never go back to old-fashioned banana bread recipes once you try this one.

Ingredients Overview

Step-by-Step Instructions

Preheat the oven to 350 F degrees. Take your ripe bananas and mash them with a fork.

As I mentioned, this is a dump cake recipe. So add the cake mix, water, oil and eggs to the cake pan.

Mix with a fork. Once the batter is mixed, take a rubber spatula and run it around the sides of the dish to get any loose cake mix.

Add mashed bananas to the batter and stir well.

Add chocolate chips to the batter and stir well.

Bake in the oven according to the cake mix package for about 16-20 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.

Cool on a wire rack before serving.

Notes

I followed the box cake mix directions exactly as printed. However, you could easily substitute the one cup of water with one cup of milk to give your banana bread a bit more protein.

Similarly, I used 1/3 of a cup of canola oil. Another kind of oil or 1/3 cup of melted butter would work as well. For a lower-fat version, you can always substitute applesauce or Greek yogurt for oil or butter. However, I can’t vouch for how well the cake will hold together.