There is absolutely no reason you'd know this (or that you'd care to!), but Magnolia Bakery's banana pudding is my favorite dessert in the world. Like, if I could only eat one thing for the rest of my life, if you stranded me on a deserted island, if I could swim in a pool of anyth—you get it. It's a lightly sweet, fluffy-as-all-hell, joyous thing to go through vats of, and we should celebrate it more.
In fact, this month is the bakery's 25th birthday, and as a celebration of both the aforementioned iconic banana pudding and the institution that birthed it, I spoke to Magnolia's Chief Baking Officer Bobbie Lloyd. We discussed all things pudding-related, from which flavors you need to try to how to really make the perfect batch at home. Without further ado, here are some things you definitely never knew about one of the most famous desserts in the country.
The recipe is not dissimilar to the one on the Nilla Wafer box.
That's why it tastes familiar, but...better. "We add sweetened condensed milk to it," Bobbie explains: "But if you look at the back of the vanilla pudding box or the back of a wafer box, it's pretty much the classic recipe that most people's grandmother made, especially down South."
It wasn't an instant hit.
If you were anywhere around New York in the early '00s, you know Magnolia's cupcakes were a phenomenon in and of themselves. The banana pudding was available pretty much from the start at their Bleecker Street location, but "it was this sleeper dessert that was an employee favorite by far, and maybe the favorite of a few customers. [We] would only make a couple of pans of it a day, and when it ran out, it ran out."
We may have—wait for it—men to thank for growing the interest in the product.
No, really:
We would hear really interesting anecdotal stories from people, mostly women, who would be like, "I love the cupcake, but my husband loves the banana pudding." It was almost like guys didn't feel they could say they loved pastel colored cupcakes, but they sure could talk about pudding. And the more people talked about it, the more they talked about it. The more we sold, the more we made; the more we sold, the more people talked.
Once it took off, it really took off.
That's not a particularly surprising fact, but Bobbie explains that after 10 years and a few production tweaks (she swapped the bakery's five-quart mixers for eight-quart mixers, for one), Magnolia's banana pudding output skyrocketed. Whereas banana pudding made up 10 percent of Magnolia's sales back in 2007, it is now responsible for 25-30 percent of what Magnolia sells in stores.
It took 20 years to make a new flavor.
By 2015, Magnolia had long been established as one of the best bakeries in NYC. That said, all of the flavors you know and love now (Peanut butter! Red velvet! Nutella!) didn't exist until the past few years. Chocolate banana pudding was a pretty obvious choice for the second flavor, Bobbie notes, given the vanilla pudding base of the original.
Its popularity reaches much farther than just New York.
But you're here, so I suspect you knew that! Anyway, as an addendum to the last point: Banana pudding makes up more than 50 percent of Magnolia's online sales.
Magnolia Bakery World-Famous Banana Pudding
Magnolia Bakery World-Famous Banana Pudding
The Flavor of the Month is never to be slept on.
Though Bobbie admits each new flavor is her "all-time favorite," she is particularly enthused about July's strawberry batch: "This one was truly my labor of insanity—it took multiple tests to get it to that one day when it was perfect." She points to the juicy (but drained of liquid!) roasted strawberries as the key to the gorgeous, sweet-but-not-too-sweet flavor.
You really can recreate Magnolia's banana pudding at home.
The ingredients are readily accessible, but she insists you "buy a mixer" to do it justice. "It's the easiest, easiest recipe to make at home when you have a mixer."
Magnolia currently has an ongoing sweepstakes pegged to their big 2-5 in which you can win free banana pudding for a year. You can find more info on how to enter here.
