Baked Banana Pudding Recipe

This banana pudding is absolutely scrumptious. It's sweet. It's decadent. It reminds me of my childhood. My grandmother used to always make some and my favorite part were the Nella wafers. This is my take on the classic banana pudding. We are going to make our own pudding and we are going to bake it. Are you ready? Let's go make some. Let me put y'all onto game on how to peel bananas. You don't peel it from the stem side. You peel it from the opposite side. Look how easy the peel comes down. I always used to struggle until I learned that I was peeling it from the wrong side. Look at this. Voila. It comes out in one nice whole piece. You want to make sure that you are using darker bananas. These are the riper ones and they're going to be a lot sweeter than the more yellow or green ones. We're going to chop these in approximately half inch circles. This is going to provide a great texture for our banana pudding. Speaking of pudding, let's get these yolks for our pudding. An easy way to get the yolk out is you crack the egg and then you just take the yolk from side to side of the shell and the whites fall off and you are left with the yolk. All right, let's start on this pudding. To a saucepan, we are going to add our milk. You want to make sure your temperature on your stove is at medium heat. To the milk, we are going to add our sugar. We are also going to add those egg yolks that we worked so hard on. You want to whisk your yolks in. We're going to add a pinch of salt. Yes, we season everything around here and then we're going to add our cornstarch. The cornstarch is going to give the pudding the texture. It's going to give it the thickness that we want. You are going to bring this to a low boil and you will see your pudding starting to thicken. This is exactly what we want. Continue to whisk to make sure you have no lumps. We want this pudding nice and smooth and silky. Once it has reached this consistency, you're going to remove it from the heat and we are going to make it even more delicious. We're going to add that butter and we're going to flavor it with some vanilla flavoring. We're going to mix this all in and there you go. You can technically put this in the refrigerator and you have beautiful, gorgeous, delicious vanilla pudding, but we are not going to stop there because this is the base for our banana pudding. We're going to take this and get ready to layer it. I am starting with these Nella wafers. Oh my goodness, these are delicious. I love them. I've loved them since I was a child. I am going to add these to a baking dish and I've already buttered this baking dish just to prevent it from sticking. We're going to just layer this with these delicious Nella wafers. Once you have the wafers covering the bottom, then it's time to go in with those bananas that we worked so hard on. We're going to get about two layers here, so make sure you are loading this first layer up. We want bananas basically in every bite. Then we are going to top it with that luscious, beautiful, thick, creamy, silky vanilla pudding. Make sure you're generous with this pudding. This is going to give it a nice wetness and a creamy texture that banana pudding is famous for. After you have covered every inch with this pudding, you're going to go back in and do your second layer. We're going to load it up with the Nella wafers. Then we're going to add our remaining bananas. Right now, your pudding should look very, very full. We're going to top it with that gorgeous, silky pudding. Then I like to top mine finally with one layer of the wafers because I told you they're my favorite. We're going to bake this at 350 degrees for 20 to 25 minutes. Look at that. We have a delicious, creamy, sweet banana pudding. Bon appetit. Let's eat.