A silky smooth banoffee microwave dessert in a mug, with fluffy banana cake surrounding a gooey caramel centre. Absolutely delicious and so quick to make!

Mug cakes for the win!

I absolutely love a good microwave mug cake! They are such a quick and easy dessert option and there are nearly endless numbers of possible flavour combinations to use to make your perfect cake.

One of my most delicious quick mug cake recipes is this five minute blueberry cheesecake mug cake, which I created one day to satisfy a sweet tooth craving when there was not much to eat in my house. Building on the success of that particular recipe, I decided to tackle another classic dessert flavour combo – bananas and toffee – in other words, Banoffee! 

Banoffee is such a classic dessert option that you might think it’s been around for ages. Not entirely true… it was actually created in a restaurant in Sussex, UK, in the 1970’s by building on a recipe from the USA for ‘toffee pie’. A bit of tweaking later and they came up with the mouthwatering toffee and banana combination we all know and love, that they kept as a permanent feature on their restaurant’s menu after customers adored it so much.

Although the original dessert to use banoffee ingredients was a pie, the classic banana and toffee combination lends itself incredibly well to a whole range of exciting desserts – from banoffee cheesecake, to ice cream, to – of course – banoffee cake. Yum!

Simple Ingredients

As with so many of my quick recipes, keeping the ingredients simple is key to success. Lets take a look at the key elements to this 5 minute banoffee mug cake and how they work together in harmony to give you such a heavenly dessert…

Go Bananas!

You can’t make this 5 minute banoffee mug cake without bananas of course! The key to this recipe is ensuring you have a banana that is nice and ripe. You need to mash the banana up with a fork and if it’s under ripe, it will take forever to do this and it just won’t have the same rich banana flavour as the ripe fruit does. So choose a banana doesn’t have any green on the skin and one that is starting to turn ever so slightly brown in places.

This also means a bonus of this quick Banoffee mug cake that it’s a perfect recipe to use up surplus bananas, which many of us find ourselves with from time to time!

In terms of amount, this 5 minute banoffee mug cake recipe calls for half a ripe banana, however obviously bananas come in different shapes and sizes so this is assuming that your banana is of medium size. If you have a particular tiny banana you may need to use nearly all of it or if you have an especially large one, you may need less than half in your cake. So feel free to apply your common sense when deciding how much banana to use.

Sweet toffee, caramel goodness

Next, let’s talk about the second key ingredient in this quick banoffee mug cake – the caramel (also called toffee). Now, waaaay back when I was a kid, I fondly remember the only way to make a decent, thick caramel sauce was to boil a can of sweetened condensed milk for an hour or two to create the sticky sweet golden caramel we all know and love. Delicious, but oh so time consuming! Thankfully, in this day and age that is no longer necessary and caramel sauce is widely available in many stores.

You can choose almost any type of caramel sauce for this 5 minute mug cake recipe, But definitely choose one that is not too runny. The caramel needs to be fairly thick texture so it holds its shape when you pop it in the centre of the cake batter. If you use to runny a caramel, you may end up with a gooey, blobby mess (although it’ll still be delicious!)

If you aren’t sure exactly what variety of caramel sauce to choose, plump for one that need to be spooned out of a jar or tin rather than one that’s in a squeezy bottle-the latter of which are likely to be runnier. For this recipe, I have used Nestlé carnation caramel sauce which comes in a tin and I find works very well.

The caramel sauce nestles comfortably in the centre of the fluffy sponge cake and often shoots up like a hot toffee volcanic eruption during the cooking process, coating the top of the cake in a warm, caramel layer which is blissful!

Batter Be Good

Holding the bananas in the caramel in their place is the mug cake batter. This is a traditional sponge cake batter… except no eggs are required! One advantage of mug cakes is you get a light and fluffy sponge even without the addition of any eggs, which is great for those folk who can’t eat them. As with most sponge cakes, it’s important to use caster (superfine) sugar rather than anything with two large grain such as granulated, to ensure a smooth sweetness and no weird crunch.

On a final note, this mug cake recipe calls for a pinch of salt in the batter. This may sound a bit odd, but salt has a funny way of helping to enhance all the flavours in many different types of cake, which is why it’s included in this banoffee mug cake recipe. Also, as we all know, salted caramel has been wildly popular in recent years so a pinch of salt go someway to recreating a classic salted caramel flavour – an extra good reason to throw in a little pinch of the stuff.

Step by step guide to making the perfect 5 minute banoffee mug cake

Now lets take a look at this helpful step by step guide to making your perfect and quick banoffee mug cake, including handy photos to help you with each step….

STEP 1;

First off, grab a standard sized mug. In it, put half a medium sized banana. Break it up into a few smaller chunks before popping it in the mug as this makes the next step a bit easier. Grab a fork and mash the banana until mushy and with no large lumps remaining. This takes about 20-30 seconds. I find a good technique is to squash it against the sides of the mug with the fork. Don’t worry if a few little lumps remain, that’s not a problem.

STEP 2;

Now it’s time to create your perfect banana cake batter! Into the mug, add 4 level tablespoons of self raising flour, 2 tablespoons of caster (superfine) sugar, 2 tablespoons of vegetable oil, 1/4 tsp of vanilla essence and a pinch of fine salt. Using the fork, stir everything briskly until it’s all well combined.

STEP 3;

Now it’s time to add the caramel! Take one rounded tablespoon of caramel / toffee sauce and plop it on the top of the cake batter, in the centre. During the cooking process, it’ll gradually ooze it’s way down into the centre of the cake but also spurt a little onto the surface, making a golden, creamy layer on the top. MMMMM.

STEP 4;

Put the mug in the microwave and cook on high power for 90 seconds (900w). If your microwave is more or less powerful than this, adjust the cooking time by a few seconds and make sure to check on it regularly.

STEP 5;

That’s it, you’re done! Now take it out of the microwave and serve warm!