Banana Bread

It never fails, I go to the grocery store and pick up a giant thing of bananas. The Monster really likes them but can only really eat 1 a day.   I being the aloof mother that I am, always forget to eat breakfast sooooo, we always have random groups of bananas in various stages of decay around the house. I freeze most of the brown ones and wait for a baking day where I can put them to good use. With my defunked gall bladder and my avoidance of further pain, I have had to research a lot of vegan recipes. This one is 98% vegan friendly and the other 2% went to the butter around the pan.

I used this recipe as a guideline for what I wanted but of course, I can't leave well enough alone and tweaked it a bit. Here goes:

Dry Ingredients:
1 cup of Oat Flour (I used my food processor to chop down steel cut oats to make oat flour)
1 cup of All Purpose Flour
4 tbsps of Cocoa Powder
1 cup of Sugar OR 1/2 c of Honey
1 tsp of Salt
1 tsp of Baking Soda
1/2 tsp of Baking Powder
3 tbsp of Cinnamon
1/8 of a tsp of Nutmeg
Wet Ingredients:
4 very ripe Bananas, mashed up
1/2 cup of Canola Oil
1/2 cup of Apple Sauce
2 tsps of Vanilla
1/8-1/4 cup of Water, reserved in a cup

1. Pre-heat your oven to 425* and butter or oil a bread pan. I used sugar to line the pan over the butter so that the edges would have a little bit of a crunch to it.
2. Mix all your dry ingredients together in a really large bowl. You can sift them together to make sure you don't have any lumps but I was cooking with a toddler today so that didn't get done!
3. Add all the wet ingredients EXCEPT the water to the dry ingredients. Depending on the humidity of the day and the humidity and moisture content of your ingredients, you may or may not need the water. Because I used Steel Cut Oats, I added about an 1/8 of the water to make sure that the bread was nice and moist but the apple sauce and the oil should keep it nice and moist but still soft crumbed.
4. Pour the mixture into the buttered/oiled and sugared pan and bake for 35 minutes for bread loaves and 15-20 for muffins at 425*. You may need to adjust the time depending on how humid the day is but start looking at it and checking it at 25 minutes for the bread loaves and 15 for the muffins.
5. Enjoy!

You can add nuts, omit the cocoa powder, etc to tailor this recipe to your nutritional needs or allergy needs. Let me know how it goes!


-Suzs