Follow this recipe to make a dessert that features a couple of unusual holiday fruits your grocer stocks over the holidays. The preparation, cooking, and plating of this lovely dessert yields eighteen portions of delicious, fragrant, nostalgic goodness.

This recipe is broken down into three stages: preparation, making, and serving. Please note the bonus material about the feature ingredients in this dish, persimmon and quince, traditional fruits enjoyed by our ancestors in America. The bonus material is found in the compote section.

Estimated preparation time: 4 hour (but you should do this in stages over a couple of days, and the long prep time is so you can slowly stew the fruit)There are embedded cleaning tasks listed because this recipe also helps get you out of the kitchen when it is time to serve desserts and entertain guests.

Get Your Stuff:

Imagine the composition of the dish: a cake slice topped with a scoop of ice cream, drizzled with compote, topped with smashed macaroon. It will be a stack of different  There is a hidden meringue level in this foodie adventure, so keep your head on a swivel!

First, get your cookware assembled so you can make this badass dessert, a juxtaposition of sensations cold and hot, creamy and crunchy, sweet and tangy, enough to blow everyone’s giblets away.

• Four mini loaf pans
• One small sauce pot  (one quart) with a lid
• One flat baking pan
• Assorted bowls
• Electric beater
• Strainer, or China hat (type of strainer good for compote)
• 12-muffin pan
• Spatulas, spoons, measuring cups
• Oven
• Range
• Containers for storing cooled cakes and macaroon stuff
• Parchment paper

Second, assemble the ingredients for the cake, compote, meringue, and toasted coconut macaroon topping. The cakes will taste better if you let them rest a day, so bake these off the day before Thanksgiving.

• 16 oz.      Rice Flour
• 2.5 tsp.   Baking Powder
• 3               Frozen bananas
• 1 tsp        Salt
• 1/2 tsp    Cinnamon
• 1 shot      Spiced rum
• 3 and 1    Egg whites, separated into two separate bowls
• 1/2 cup    Marmalade
• Dash        Ancho chile powder – they won’t know
• 3/4 cup    Brown sugar
• 1/2 cup     Sugar
• 1 cup         Confectioner’s sugar
• 1 bag         Coconut flakes, sweetened
• 1 cup         Coconut milk
• 1 Tbsp       Coconut oil
• 1                 Apple
• 1                 Quince
• 2                 Persimmon
• 1                 Stick of butter
• 1 tsp          Toasted sesame oil
• 3 tsp          Honey

Make Your Stuff:

Put the bananas in the freezer a day or two before Thanksgiving and ignore them for now.

Prepare the compote in advance so it has a chance to rest. When the compote rests, it will be a touch sweeter and a bit firmer, though not by much. Remove the cores from the apple and quince. Remove the crowns from the persimmons, chop everything roughly and put into sauce pot with 1/2 cup of sugar and about 1/2 cup of water.  When the water gets low, add more. The quince will take at least an hour to get soft enough for you to cut the flesh with a teaspoon.  I checked on it every fifteen minutes to stir in more water and poke the quince bits.

When quince is soft, dump admixture into a strainer and force it through the mesh into a bowl, cool to room temp, transfer to closed container in refrigerator. The aroma is absolutely amazing, even over-powering the smell of rosemary butter, roasting turkey and such. The persimmon and quince give a floral dimension to the stewed apples and persimmon, and the smell is at once unique and familiar.

Some Fruity Context:

A ye olde quince buzz:

Edward Johnson in The Wonderworking Providence of Sion’s Savior in New England of 1654 says,

“…so that in this poor Wilderness hath not onely equalized England in food, but goes beyond it in some places for the great plenty of wine and sugar, which is ordinarily spent, apples, pears, and quince tarts instead of their former Pumpkin Pies.”

A ye olde persimmon recipe:

Here is old recipe which been recreated for Persimmon Pudding with Burnt Sugar Syrup.

1 cup persimmon pulp
1 cup white sugar
1 egg, beaten
1 cup flour
1/2 cup sweet milk
1/2 cup sour milk
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon cinnamon
2 tablespoons butter

Mix ingredients in order given. Pour into greased 8 x 8 inch baking pan or dish. Bake at 350 degrees for half an hour.

Burnt Sugar Syrup

1 cup brown sugar
1 tablespoon flour
1 cup hot water
1 tablespoon butter

While the persimmon pudding is baking, mix the syrup ingredients together in order given. Stir over low heat until sugar dissolves. When pudding is done, after 30 minutes, remove from oven and pour syrup mixture over pudding. Return pudding to oven and bake another 5 minutes.

Information from “Old Fashioned Persimmon Recipes”, Bear Wallow Books, 1978.

Batter up! Pre-heat oven to 350 F. Chop the bananas and drop them into large mixing bowl with dry cake mix. Add coconut milk, toasted sesame oil, rum and three egg yolks. Use electric egg beater to mix it all, adding in coconut oil after it becomes smooth and lumps are small. Divide the batter into four oiled (more coconut oil) mini-loaf pans, filling them about 2/3 of the way full. Open the oven and place a flat sheet on the center oven rack, then place the four mini-loaf pans on the flat sheet. Close door, set timer for 25 minutes, wash dishes, then get ready for the meringue.

Bake the cakes for approximately 25 minutes, until loaves brown, and may need 8-10 minutes more in your oven according to the size of your oven. The crowns split and a butter knife slides cleanly from out of a loaf. Expect the bananas to make the cake a bit sticky. The cakes will be very springy. Set oven to 375F. Let the four loaves cool for about fifteen minutes

Make the meringue. This is the bridge too far in this recipe. When it comes out, this meringue is going to make your cute, lovely golden brown loaves look like they have cancer, and the meringue sort of behaves like a slime mold, very delicate and textured, but becomes liquid when touched.  When the meringue is cooked in the pan later with butter, it will become further caramelized. Mix the egg whites and the confectioner’s sugar in a bowl with electric beater, and add the marmalade. Work it for about three minutes. Take some parchment paper, grease it with coconut oil and place the four banana rum loaves on it.

Spoon the meringue on the loaves, making sure they all get covered. Much of it might slide onto the pan. That’s OK. The loaves are swimming in an orange-flecked foam.

Bake the meringue atop the loaves  about 5 to 10 minutes. The peaks will darken quickly, if you have any peaks. Remove from oven and set aside to cool for an additional ten minutes. I drizzled some honey atop the loaves halfway through cooking the meringue. Do the dishes after drying and stowing the other dishes. 

Make the coconut macaroon cups. Turn the oven down to 325F and get ready to make macaroon cups. Grease a muffin pan with coconut oil. Mix confectioner’s sugar and egg whites in bowl, add in coconut flakes and mix by hand, and it takes a while because it’s a lot of material to coat with slimy sugar. Divide the macaroon mix into the dozen muffin cups, place muffin pan into oven, bake for 15 minutes. Check every minute or so until cups have become mostly browned and toasted crispy, but not so dark they taste burned. Remove from oven immediately and set aside to cool.

Remove the cakes from the weird apocalyptic marmalade foam and stow them away for tomorrow. Let them rest overnight.

Dishes, you know.

Fast forward to tomorrow. Land casserole and soups.

Serve Your Stuff

Slice cakes about 1/2 thick, place in pan greased with a drop of coconut oil or two and a Tbsp. Of butter. Place about 6 t0 8 slices in the pan, turning them over in the bubbling butter.

Toast the slices, turn them over and toast the other side.  Add more butter if needed. Let the sides brown lightly. The more butter you use, the longer it stays hot. Move the slices to plates for serving.

Mount ice cream on hot cakes. Put a scoop of ice cream on each slice of bread. Check your long-game here. You should only plate a panful at a time because you have very little time to get the sundaes to the table before they get boring. The ice cream needs to be melting on hot banana rum cake.

 Drizzle compote on that. A tsp. of sauce should be fine.

Sprinkle toasted coconut macaroon garnish on that, too.

Throw pan in sink and leave it. Do the dishes later. 

This pairs well with root beer or straight scotch whiskey, just like everything else on earth.