You’ve heard the saying “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure”, right? Well in this case, one woman’s ripe bananas are another woman’s treasure! My friend Juli loves bananas, but only up to a certain point of ripeness (lightly speckled). Whenever her bananas cross that threshold, she brings them to work for me. It’s not uncommon for me to have a few bananas stinking up my cubicle at the end of the week, when she brings me her “trash”. I gladly accept because even though I buy two bunches of bananas a week, they’re almost always gone before I have a chance to do anything fun with them.

To me, of course, Juli’s bananas are hardly ripe! I usually let them ripen for several more days before I peel and freeze them. Lately I’ve been using them faster than I can freeze them. Most weekend mornings I start the day off with a spinach smoothie (ensuring that if the rest of that day’s eating goes to crap, at least I had something green). Any other leftover bananas have been finding their way into a batch of my new favorite bananabread. Wanting to change things up a bit, I decided to make some banana bars with cream cheese frosting…and now I think all other forms of ripe banana usage should be on the lookout because these are some serious competition!

Adapted from a Taste of Home recipe, I significantly reduced the sugar, both in the bars (by 1 cup) and the frosting (by 2 cups). The end result was still plenty sweet, and that’s coming from the Sweet Tooth Queen herself! The bars are light and cakey, with visible flecks of banana, and the cream cheese frosting makes it all better—because when doesn’t cream cheese frosting make something better?!

So long as “trashed” bananas keep heading my way, you can expect to see more banana baked goods around here!