What do you get when you combine a recipe for carmelized bananas and a pear-apple-cranberry crisp recipe?

Drool over the above picture and find out.

Pardon me for a few moments while I gloat.

See that picture up there of perfect sugary fruity-crispy goodness? I made that. On my own, all by myself.

I was dreaming (again) about my friend Sarah’s crisp she shared and still feeling disappointed with how my variation turned out with that. I knew I had to fix it so I began experimenting with ideas in my head. At the same time, I was thinking about how I could use bananas in a different way and thought about carmelizing them. Thankfully I’m not the only one with such a crazy idea so I found recipes for carmelized bananas quickly and then had some fun playing around in the kitchen until I came up with something pretty.darn.delicious. (but maybe only about 5% healthy) I ‘accidentally’ put in too much sugar so it was a little on the sweet side (too bad….)

So here’s the final recipe I came up with. Feel free to use less sugar as needed! And if you try this, let me know what you think and how you think it could be improved as I think I’ll probably play around with this again.

Fruit I used:

2 very ripe Bananas

2 very ripe Pears

Carmelizing powers came from:

1/2 TB Butter

3 TB Brown Sugar

1/4 cup OJ (or use rum if you’re cool and have that kind of thing in your pantry)

1/8 tsp cinnamon

Crispy topping:

1 1/2 cups Flour (use whole wheat flour if you want to pretend like this is a ‘healthy’ dessert)

1/2 cup white sugar (this is where I ‘accidentally’ spilled too much and ended up with maybe 1 cup oops!)

1/2 cup brown sugar (and somehow I managed to ‘accidentally’ spill a bit more again! Gee whiz!)

1/2 tsp salt (good thing I didn’t spill this!)

1 tsp cinnamon

1 cup Barley flakes (you can use oats but they make my tummy hurt)

Finishing Touch:

1/2 to 1 cup of butter, melted. You’ll need enough to cover the top before baking.

Now, what to do with all this?

1. Skin and dice your pear and banana and then follow the directions for carmelizing them here.

2. Once that’s done, scoop that out into an 8×8 square lightly greased (buttered) baking pan.

3. Whisk the dry topping ingredients together in a bowl.

4. Pour that evenly over the carmelized fruit in the pan.

5. Lastly, cover it all with the melted butter. (Settle down – haven’t you heard that butter is good for you?!) This step is important! I only put diced butter over the top at first. But the flour and topping wouldn’t bake and we didn’t want to eat loose unbaked flour. So I thought, hmmm, what can I do to make it bake? I think the baking angels must have whispered in my ear because somehow I thought, “Hey what if I pour melted butter over the top?” And it worked! So be sure to do this for that nice golden and crisp topping.

6. Bake @ 350 F. I’d say start with 30 minutes and then check it to see if the top looks ‘golden’ enough. If not, bake it a bit longer but watch that you don’t burn it!

I really liked this carmelizing business. I’ve been dreaming up other ways I could use that. I might try adding in raisins and/or cranberries next time. Or maybe I’ll try a carmelized fruit cheesecake next…