Banana boats are a popular camping dessert, with a banana filled with toppings like chocolate chips and marshmallows, wrapped in foil, and roasted over a fire. Customizable to taste, but caution should be exercised when handling hot ingredients and fire.
A banana boat is a dessert designed to be made while camping. Many generations of campers have developed their own unique takes on the banana boat; the first published recipes for this dessert appear in Girl Scout guides. As one might imagine, the centerpiece of the dessert is a banana that is topped with an assortment of ingredients of choice and then roasted over a fire to heat the banana up and transform the dessert into a rich, gooey mass.
Make bananas
To make a banana boat, campers take a whole banana and split it partially down the middle, creating a slit. The slot is filled with ingredients like chocolate chips, marshmallows, peanut butter, and caramel sauce. Then the banana – with the peel remaining – is wrapped in foil. The foil-wrapped banana is then roasted in the coals of a fire for five to 10 minutes, until the peel begins to blacken. It can be eaten after letting it cool for a few minutes.
Customized to taste
Like s’mores, another popular camping treat, a banana boat is a very flexible food, and people can customize theirs with ingredients they like, like peppermint patties or nuts. Some people prefer to stick with the classic chocolate-banana pairing, leaving additional ingredients for more adventurous cooks. Bananas can get a little messy, because the softened and heated ingredients tend to get quite liquidy, but that could be part of the fun for some campers.
Watch out for young campers
Banana boating involves contact with fire, so it’s a good idea for adults to supervise younger campers. The dessert can get quite hot and the ingredients may splatter when the banana is opened, so caution should be exercised when the banana is removed from the heat. Adults can also help very young campers make slits in their bananas and may want to offer advice on ingredient pairings; Peppermint patties and peanut butter, for example, might not go so well together.
Other items needed
People planning to build banana trees on a camping trip should pack bananas and assorted toppings, along with foil and a set of tongs for moving the bananas around the fire. Alternatively, a long-handled basket like the one used for grilling corn could hold the bananas in place as they roast. Banana trees can get messy, so campers may also want to bring a pack of wet wipes or tea towels in plastic bags, which can be used to wipe sticky fingers and faces.
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