A CAKE TO KEEP YOUR SWEET TOOTH IN SHAPE

Pack it with fruit and pile on the icing

There is banana bread. And there is banana cake. And though the two share many sweet traits in common, they are not at all the same thing. Banana bread, baked in a loaf pan, is necessarily restrained — the kind of thing you feel good about eating for breakfast. Though it might have a thin glaze or sugar topping, it never has frosting. You might even spy healthful flecks of wheatgerm or flaxseeds folded in to the batter.

But such nods to wholesomeness have no place in a banana cake.

With towering layers covered in billowing frosting, banana cake qualifies as dessert, not breakfast — unless, of course, a sugar rush is your waking intention.

This version is most definitely a cake: a fluffy, festooned pile of shaggy coconut and caramelised, buttery banana. With their rich, round tropical flavours, coconut and banana are beautifully complementary.

The cake layers house the bananas, which are roasted until golden and syrupy before being mashed into the batter.

Roasting the bananas is a clever trick I picked up from the internet. It intensifies their fruitiness and gives them toasted, caramelised notes. Roasting also helps along bananas that are not quite ripe enough to be turned into cake — the ones with peels that are mostly yellow rather than speckled brown. While riper is always better for banana cake (and banana bread for that matter), roasting gives you a slightly wider window of banana usability.

The coconut appears in both the cake and the frosting. Fluffy and white, it is similar to a classic cream-cheese frosting, but coconut cream stands in for some of the cream cheese. Be sure to use pure coconut cream and not cream of coconut (which you’d blend into a piña colada). If you’re unsure, read the label; if there’s any mention of added sugar, it’s not the right stuff. You can also use pure, full-fat coconut milk if you can’t find coconut cream; just chill and skim the solid cream off the top.

Since this is a cake and not a quick bread, be sure to use sweetened shredded coconut rather than the unsweetened kind. Without sugar steeped into the flakes, they won’t turn golden and crunchy in the oven the way you want.

Revelling in the sweet mashup of sugar, butter, bananas and coconut is what this cake is all about. If you’re looking for something lighter and leaner, there are plenty of salubrious banana bread recipes out there. This one’s to keep your sweet tooth in shape.