Bananapapple Cake with Beer Icing in a Cast Iron Skillet

How’d We Get That Name: BANANAPAPPLE CAKE?

A Dutch Oven Camping Story

A few weeks ago we went camping with this dessert on the menu. There are three things that mix well: Camping, Dutch oven cooking, and BEER. And, when camping in a very public, people-filled campsite on an open plain in the high desert with it’s unpredictable weather, BEER helps maintain that bit of emotional stoicism and makes for a fabulous camping trip.

When packing for a camping trip we always include beer to cook with, drink “with,” and a few extras as a just-in-case “with.” On the way out of town, we made a visit to our favorite, local pub to “raid” the fridge. My pub always has a few interesting brews in the cooler (and sometimes hidden elsewhere if I ask and look pitiful enough).

The cooler is where they keep the $7.00, $12.00 and even the $25.00 cans and bottles of fermented awesomeness. Though the $25 brews are *usually* avoided, there was this one $12.00 brew that caught my eye. Not by the complexity of the can art (something that draws me in like an enticing book cover). As can art goes, this one was sorta a plain-Jane.

Then, boogedy…boogedy…boogedy…off to the great wild to blaze a trail to a very public, and “groomed” campsite. Our camping season usually starts with this local campground that has many things to do such as scorpion hunting, an observatory, sand dunes, and WIND! Oh my gracious. The wind is often relentless out there; but it’s a hit-or-miss. This time: MISS!

Nonetheless, we had beer, iron, and plenty of food.

“Black as midnight, black as pitch, blacker than the foulest witch.” – Blix the Goblin

The Black Beer

We had eaten breakfast before departing on our adventure; I knew we’d be eating a little earlier in the evening than normal. So, I skipped a lunch in order to “save some room” for the cast iron creation that was planned for that evening. At three in the afternoon, with all that wind and blusteriness, there wasn’t much to do other than pull the Dutches out, add fire to the coals, and crack a beer.

That $12 brew poured black as midnight. Despite the blowing wind, the sun was shining bright. When I held up that glass up to the sun, I thought about the Black Knight, “NONE SHALL PASS!”  (And if you don’t get that reference, we just can’t be friends). It was dark. It was sweet. And, it was delicious! 16-ounces of pure joy! Definitely a “sipper” and one to drink like cooking a great roast: low-and-slow.

A bit later I pulled out the 12” Dutch oven and started assembling my Cantina Jack Chicken recipe. Then I pulled out my 8” Dutch oven to “assemble” this dessert. I say, “this dessert,” because I had not come up with a name for it yet. These recipes are trial-and-error to get them just right and I usually name them after the fact. I knew I had to come up with something clever and tropical-sounding. After all, with ingredients like bananas and pineapples, what could be a better dessert to plan for during a camping trip with 20 mile per hour winds and a high of 40-something degrees (tongue-in-cheek)?

Once the Cantina Jack Chicken was in the pot and “under the fire,” I started gathering the supplies for our dessert…but…something went kinda catawampus. And not a cooking catawampus but my ability to think-kind of catawampus. Just trying to “do the math” on my coal-count for my little 8” Dutch was giving me grief. At my house math is my “thing,” and English is my wife’s “thing.” But I just couldn’t seem to think. The first problem I had was trying to figure out twice of eight and how many coals to go on top and then on the bottom. 

I thought I asked that question in my head.

My wife just stared at me with her why-are-you-asking-me-math-questions look when I asked, “What’s two times eight?” At first, I didn’t realize I asked that question out loud; it was supposed to be an “internal affair” rather than an embarrassing “external” question (you know, when you thought you said it in your head but your mouth didn’t get the memo). My wife usually gives me a “math look” when I ask her math problems. But, this “math look” was different. After I answered my own question, she asked to see my beer (that I had only had half). She said, “No wonder.”

There was this short period of time where her “no wonder” comment entered my ear but had not yet registered in my brain. My brain was busy toiling over the dessert preparations. Not to mention the distracting aromas from that cooking Cantina Jack Chicken as they piggybacked on the steam sneaking out from the edges of the lid of that 12” Dutch. “Wonder what?” Turns out my sweet, dark, barrel-aged porter was a fifteen-percenter. I ate breakfast but planned on “saving room” for double helpings of that Cantina Jack Chicken for dinner.

Not to Brag

Most would like to brag about how they came up with a name for a recipe; there ain’t no bragging here. I was having so much trouble thinking but didn’t correlate the beer as the culprit. What I meant to say next was “Why am I having so much trouble making this banana and pineapple dessert?” What came out was, “Why am I having so much trouble making this bananapapple dessert?!” 

Now I wondered, “why is my wife laughing so hard.”

“What?