A little while ago, Cooking Light had a recipe for Roasted Banana Pudding. I'm not always in the mood for banana pudding, but honestly, making banana pudding sounded like the perfect excuse to buy a box of vanilla wafers. They're a great snack.
For the record, store-bought vanilla wafers are the only particularly easy thing about this recipe. Not that it's hard. It just is time-consuming.
You start off by roasting 5 bananas - you take 3 out after 20 minutes, and bake the other 2 another 20 minutes. I misread the instructions and took 3 out after 30 minutes. Oops. You let all the bananas cool completely. Slice the 3 bananas you roasted 20 minutes, and mash the other 2.
Next, you make a custard on the stove. I make pudding relatively often, so this isn't difficult for me either. It just takes time. Heat milk with a little sugar, while you mix together sugar, eggs, a little salt, and cornstarch. Gradually whisk the hot milk into the egg mixture, slowly, so you don't cook the eggs as you combine the two. Return the mixture to heat and cook for 3 minutes, stirring constantly, until it thickens. Remove from heat and add the mashed banana, butter, and vanilla. They said to cool in an ice water bath, but I just set the pan in the sink and melted a couple of ice cubes alongside it. Once it's cool enough, you mix in 6 ounces of whipped topping.
Now you finally get to assemble the banana pudding. Pudding on bottom, vanilla wafers, bananas - repeat once, and top with rest of pudding. Top that with the remaining whipped topping. Top with crushed vanilla wafers as garnish. Chill overnight so vanilla wafers can soften.
Are you tired of reading about how to make this pudding? Because honestly, I got tired of making it.
The pudding was creamy and definitely bananay. Because you mix whipped topping into the pudding you cook on the stove, it was lighter and a little runnier than my homemade pudding usually is. It was a little thin. I did not like the roasted banana slices in the banana pudding, although they may have had a better texture if I hadn't cooked them too long.
Roasted Banana Pudding was tasty enough and was a satisfying snack, but I don't feel like it was any better than any other banana pudding I've ever had. I think this is one dessert I'm happy making from a box. If I'm already going to use Cool Whip and vanilla wafers, why shouldn't I make it easy and use a couple of boxes of instant pudding? And this is me, the person who makes vanilla pudding on a whim - I'm saying I'd rather just use a box of pudding mix to make banana pudding. This recipe seemed to take a long time, and the payout just isn't worth it.
If you want roasted bananas in your pudding, go ahead and roast bananas and add them to a box of vanilla pudding, or whatever other kind of pudding you'd like to make. I'm sure it would make your banana pudding distinctive. Personally, I'll stick with the convenience of store-bought products to make banana pudding in the future, and cook a vanilla pudding to use if I feel particularly inspired.
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