Chocolate Chocolate Chip Banana Bread Cake – vegan, gluten-free, refined sugar-free

I made this chocolate chocolate-chip banana bread cake last week and thought it would be just the recipe to follow up the last three posts about my healing story. 

I love sharing with you the recipes I’ve adjusted and adapted that make food, cooking and life more enjoyable while healing. Lately though I’ve been thinking… I tend to focus a lot on the recipes and not as much on the why – which is a much more complicated, both technically and emotionally, to talk about.

I could write all day long about how to turn old bananas into cake, alternatives to flour, and how to store flax seeds. What I really should be telling you is why go to all that trouble when you can just go get a cupcake. 

If you read my healing story you know that I changed my diet to identify food triggers of inflammation and help bring down the overall level of inflammation in my body. 

I’m working on a separate post that will go into inflammatory food triggers in more detail. For now, I’ll tell you the main foods I removed from diet at first were: wheat, dairy and soy. 

Later on I took it up a notch to include a few more: corn, eggs, peanuts and nightshade vegetables (tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant and peppers). 

For now I’ll just leave it as we started with wheat, dairy and soy because these foods contain large proteins that can be hard for the body to digest and removing them is like taking away obstacles that inhibit the body’s ability to heal. 

I’ll go into more of the details on what’s really going on here in that other post. Today I want to get to that chocolate chocolate-chip banana bread… I owe you a good recipe this week! 

For a long time I resisted eliminating those foods that seemed so unavoidable because I thought it meant eliminating life itself. 

It felt like I’d have to divorce food from pleasure and make it purely a thing of sustenance. I prepared myself for that.

And I put it off and put it off. Because nobody wants to live like that! 

I think what gave me the confidence and comfort to finally go all in was that in that time leading up to taking that leap, I’d been making small changes all along. 

I had started experimenting with new foods I’d never tried, some I’d never heard before, like quinoa and millet, full-fat coconut milk, and so many vegetables I never knew I liked. 

One of my turning point discoveries was when I figured out I could still bake without gluten and dairy.

And through a lot of trial and error I figured out tricks so it even tasted good – to the point where I’d serve it to friends and they didn’t even know they were eating something that was gluten-free! (shhh, don’t tell). 

I was moving forward, and like you do with ex-boyfriends, I was thinking less and less about wheat, dairy and soy.

I was finding new foods that I loved even more, and most importantly, that loved me back! 

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I found a way to have my cake and eat it too. And more importantly, to be able to share and enjoy it with others, which I now understand is equally important when it comes to food as the sustenance it provides. 

I share recipes like this chocolate chocolate chip banana bread cake so you and anyone else faced with dietary changes or challenges know that you should be able to eat cake too. 

Even if it’s only the rare occasion, and it has to be made out of bananas, I believe everyone should be able to enjoy a piece of cake. 

I hope you enjoy this one. 

Chocolate Chocolate Chip Banana Bread Cake

Chocolate Chocolate Chip Banana Bread Cake - gluten-free, dairy-free, vegan

 

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Prep time

10 mins

Cook time

60 mins

Total time

1 hour 10 mins

 

gluten-free, dairy-free, vegan, healthy-ish chocolate bread that let's be honest is more like cake.

Author: Megan Adams Brown

Recipe type: sweet

Serves: 10

Ingredients

• 1 egg (or 1 tbsp flax meal + 3 tbsp water)
• 1 cup gluten free flour (can be all purpose gf flour blend, gf oat flour, or almond flour)
• ½ cup raw cacao powder
• 1 tsp baking soda
• ½ tsp sea salt
• 3 large ripe bananas
• ⅓ cup virgin coconut oil, melted
• ½ cup coconut sugar
• 1 tsp pure vanilla extract
• ½ cup chocolate chips

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 350°. Get out a 9x5 loaf pan (alternatively for a more cake-like presentation you can use an 8x8 dish or a round). Grease or line the dish with parchment paper.
2. If using egg substitute, in a small bowl combine flax and water and whisk. Set aside 5-10 min. to let gel.
3. In a large bowl, combine flour, cacao, baking soda, salt and whisk to combine.
4. In a blender (or in a bowl with a mixer or hand mixer) combine bananas, coconut oil, coconut sugar, vanilla, egg (or flax meal mixture) and blend/mix.
5. Pour wet ingredients into dry and stir to mix evenly. Stir in ¼ cup chocolate chips (feel free to add more if you prefer extra chocolatey).
6. Pour batter into baking dish. Sprinkle the rest of the chocolate chips on top.
7. Bake for 1 hour.
8. When done, insert a toothpick to test to see if done. If the toothpick doesn't come out mostly clean (aside from a little melted chocolate from the chips) then continue cooking another 5-10 minutes.
9. Let cool completely before cutting.
10. Note: When I made this I cut the bread into slices and then halved the slices to make smaller squares, sort of like brownies. I did still eat them two at a time, though. 😉

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• raw cacao powder – the difference here is raw cacao is unprocessed so it’s nutrients remain intact
• whole flax seeds – I prefer to buy the seeds whole and grind them myself because they have a longer shelf-life that way, whole they’ll last 12 months in the fridge, ground only 1-3 months in fridge/freezer
• coconut oil  – I look for virgin, unrefined
• coconut sugar – has more nutrients than refined sugar, lower glycemic index and less dramatic effect on blood sugar
• vanilla extract – this one is alcohol-free and gluten-free
• chocolate chips – these are vegan and gluten-free

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