This buttery, tangy banana cake is your sign that spring has arrived

One bite — really just one whiff — and my feet are in the sand — a whirl of weeklong spring beach trips over the last thirty-five years, coconut tanning oil and Coppertone sunscreen and the honeysuckle sweetness of the first magnolia blossoms. It is sea spray softened paperback and laughter filled reunions. Dense and sweet and cold, it tastes like freedom and zero responsibilities.

Born adrenaline averse, I have never sought being in the thick of crowds. Spring Break on Panama City Beach, Daytona, or even among the throngs of rowdy teenagers close to home never appealed. My hedonistic weeklong breaks from school were about resting up and devouring novels, my stack of fiction pushed aside through semesters of full class loads and at least one job.

Like the books I could not wait to dive into, this cake became another constant. I either brought it along or made it once I settled at my destination. Habit? Seasonal craving? I am unsure how it became synonymous with this time of year, but it is fully entrenched. 

Banana Cake is for right now — for windy, sunny, even chilly and stormy, abundant spring! It is not something I associate with any one person but rather with a particular time, this time, a certain kind of day, a specific smell in the air. 

If I avoid looking into a mirror and take a bite, I am my nineteen year old self — sun bleached locks framing my face, leaner and more muscular — always somewhere close to a water’s edge. My memories of place and people dance together, some Polaroid-like, the exactitudes of which I will never forget. Others combine to forge inexact recollections, grouping together years of returning to specific family properties, rental houses and cottages, condos and campsites. 

Pressing my lips firmly around a forkful to cleanly drag all the icing and every moist crumb, I could be in my own front yard of Alabama beaches—Gulf Shores, Orange Beach, Perdido Key—or along some nearby river or creek. I could be farther south, in Islamorada (Florida Keys), at The Moorings, a secluded and sprawling former coconut plantation (and the first place I genuinely felt was paradise on Earth) to which I made an annual pilgrimage for many years in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. Lying close to the water on a cushioned topped wooden chaise listening to the sound of palm fronds tapping in the breeze, I know I had plenty of worries, but for the life of me I cannot bring to mind what they were.

I make Banana Cake and have it covered and ready in the icebox for a week when I have time to squeeze fresh pink grapefruit juice for both breakfast and sunset cocktails. It is the chilled bite I want, straight from the refrigerator in the afternoon, and it provides the perfect counter-taste to simple dinners made with little effort in the low light of a seaside bungalow. It can relieve my anxiety in between hand after hand of gin rummy while feeling the electric charge of a thunderstorm moving in from offshore and right over my rooftop, and it will be breakfast when I wake to the calm morning that follows.  

Banana Cake is what I want after dragging my chair, towels, drinks, snacks and bag across a football field of grainy Earth for what will turn out to be an unsuccessful, and far from uncommon, spring day at the beach. Banana Cake will taste the way the day was supposed to go, but April days are unpredictable. Whether a car ride away or just a short walk, you head to towards the water with nothing but clear skies. You feel a nice breeze and think it will make the day even nicer, and half the time it does. But, other times that light breeze is more like a gale force along the shore. You ignore it picking up while you make your nest: secure the corners of your blanket, adjust your umbrella and finally, comfortably recline. It is only then, once you are still, that a now low, whipping wind, riddled with sand begins pricking and abrading your skin and collecting in the pages of your novel; it is intolerable.

A decent Plan B is to leave the majority of your stuff, move back from the water, and see if protection can be found tucked into the valleys of sand dunes. Really though, you are only busying yourself and putting off the inevitable trek back home for a few more minutes.  

Packed in my picnic basket beside my chair, Banana Cake joined me while watching sunsets on some of the most beautiful, sugar white, talcum powder soft beaches in the world. When baked in my home oven, the smell of it complements the honeysuckle sweetness of all that is blooming outside: my tall and tangled magnolias dotted throughout with creamy white flowers, sweet olive bushes and viburnum bursting out with clusters of tiny pale buds, lillies and climbing roses—splendor.    

Like background music behind the compilation of a lifetime of spring trips, boat days, and springtime weeks at home with my flower-babies, some planted and nursed from infancy, Banana Cake tastes of easy times, of breakfast casseroles, boiled shrimp and toasted, open-faced pimento cheese and cucumber sandwiches. It marks the beginning of going barefoot and the initial self consciousness of baring more skin, and with no cinnamon to hark back to winter or fall, it is tropical enough to add to the vernal vibe.  

Everything about Banana Cake brings my backward glances into focus with the passing years drawing out the spaces in between the things that shook, uprooted, and sent me hurtling in a new direction. What a blessing it would have been to know and trust things were going to work out, maybe not how I thought or wanted at the time, but workout nonetheless. Relationships, health crises, jobs, professors, exams, house issues, car problems; turns out none were all that fret worthy—I mean, here I am, enjoying Banana Cake looking out at the water, healthy and happy, feeling like I am where I am supposed to be.