When I had bananas on the counter that were becoming too spotty, I used to turn to one and only one place: my favorite quick banana bread recipe. But banana bread isn’t the only choice for dealing with old bananas, and it’s always a good idea to try something new every now and again, especially if it leads to cake. Banana Bread Crumb Cake might be my new favorite banana recipe.

This stuff is great. It’s sufficiently like a coffee cake to work for breakfast, but it’s also sweet enough to serve as dessert. And, while it has a delicious mild banana bread flavor (with a lighter crumb), the crumb topping drew me in immediately. While you must wait till you have some old bananas, this is the type of dish for which you are likely to already have the majority of the ingredients in your pantry. The ingredients are simple: flour, butter, sugar, salt, and eggs.

You’ll need three bananas, and the perfect stage is when they’ve turned spotty but not black. Once blackened, they become extremely sweet and soft, and the flavor begins to change slightly. A spotted banana is the ideal happy medium.

As with banana bread, simply mash the bananas and then begin to make your batter. You start with butter, sugar, eggs, and vanilla, then add your dry ingredients and milk. This recipe yields enough for a 9×13 pan.

Don’t get me wrong, the cake is delicious, but my favorite part could be the crumb topping. This is a basic recipe that requires only cubed butter, brown sugar, and flour to be crumbled into coarse crumbs. Some goes in the middle, with batter stacked beneath and above, and the remainder is sprinkled all over the top. It takes approximately the same amount of time to bake as a loaf of banana bread (around 50 minutes), but I can assure you that it is well worth it. This is something I enjoy making when we have company. It’s always popular with youngsters, but adults also enjoy it, especially with a cup of coffee.