Magnolia’s Famous Banana Pudding

Magnolia’s is probably one of New York’s most famous bakeries (thanks to Sex and the City) but I find their cupcakes a little dry. Whenever I stop by the shop, instead of waiting in line for their cupcakes, I usually end up getting a small order of their banana pudding. It’s light and airy yet really decadent. I looked up the recipe and it’s surprisingly easy to make – perfect for a Friday treat to bring into the office.

The ingredients:

Don’t even bother getting the reduced fat Nilla wafers – I mean, if you’re using heavy cream, just go all out, right?!

First, combine the condensed milk with water and blend:

After the mixture is combined, add the instant vanilla pudding:

Mix the vanilla pudding with the condensed milk and water mixture until everything is blended together:

Let the pudding sit in the fridge for at least 4 hours (I let mine sit overnight because I didn’t want to put the entire pudding together the night before).

In the morning, I whipped up the heavy cream until peaks form.

Before:

After:

Yum! It’s starting to look good (even though there’s no sugar in the whipped cream, there’s something so deliciously awesome about heavy cream, don’t you think?)

Okay, now it’s time to combine the pudding and the heavy cream:

After carefully combining the whipped cream with the pudding, you should get a light yellowish mixture like so:

The recipe suggests that the pudding mixture should set for 4 hours (but no longer than 8), so I woke up early on Friday morning to assemble this amazing pudding. First, I cut up some bananas (about 5 bananas, but I bought more just in case):

And started layering the nilla wafers, bananas, and pudding:

I got through about three layers before I ran out of nilla wafers (although I still had some pudding left):

I finished the banana pudding with a nice layer of light and fluffy pudding and a banana:

After carefully transporting it to the office, I let it sit in the fridge for 5 hours (until after lunch) and we all dug into it as we sang happy birthday to our friends at work. The pudding got rave reviews (actually, people said it was BETTER than Magnolia’s!) It’s super simple to make and definitely an amazing treat!