Define "snack cake"

I haven't definitively figured out what makes a cake a snack cake, but based on my limited research (which included wading through links for Hostess and Lil Debbie varieties), it seems to be a kind of cake you can pack up and stash somewhere and devour wherever and whenever. So whereas a rich layer cake may be more of an event, a piece of throw-in-the-bag snack cake just makes part of your day better. Whatever it is, or is not, I am generally a fan of packing cake in my lunch to save for my mid-afternoon slump.

So yes, I made a snack cake. This recipe for banana-oat snack cake came to me via Bon Appetit after I found a freezer bag of frozen bananas, a fresh bag of crystallized ginger, and an annoyingly inadequate amount of chocolate chips to do much else with. The recipe doesn't actually call for the ginger or the chocolate, but if I've learned anything in these almost 35 years, it's that ginger and chocolate take banana cakes to the highest dimension of "good" in a banana baked good. So I added them. 

Also, the recipe is written as though you have fresh, perfectly yellow bananas, because you are to chop them, rather than mash. I was working with frozen mush, and it worked just fine in the end. I am sure the texture was altered a bit, but the taste was perfectly banana-y and the cake was moist like banana bread.

Today I packed one up in my lunch and looked forward to a happy moment of afternoon snacking all morning.