When I’m getting ready to carb-load for a race, there’s one thing I feel I just can’t do without: banana bread (or banana muffins – basically the same thing!). So as I’m preparing to carb-load for my upcoming Long Beach Marathon (which is now only 5 days away, eek), I’m in the kitchen prepping up a storm. Energy bars, muffins and of course, this banana bread.
I made it last week for hubby, my default taste tester. He gave it a two thumbs up right away, at which point I breathed a sigh of relieve because I swear, my recent choice to completely remove all sugar from the kitchen doesn’t always make baking easy! I’ve been using only maple syrup and honey, as well as a bit of brown rice syrup and blackstrap molasses here and there. As well as ripe bananas and dates of course, natures best natural sweeteners!
So here it is, my gluten-free (using oats) and sugar-free (using maple syrup and honey) banana bread. With hemp hearts in there of course, because by now you pretty much would be shocked not to see hemp hearts in one of my recipes 😉
Makes 1 loaf (12 slices)
Ingredients
- 1½ cups mashed ripe bananas (you’ll need about 3-4 bananas for this amount)
- ½ cup melted organic virgin coconut oil (or melted organic butter)
- ¼ cup maple syrup
- ¼ cup honey
- ¼ cup chia seeds
- 2 organic eggs, beaten
- 1 tsp pure vanilla extract
- 2 cups oat flour
- 2 tsp baking powder
- ½ tsp fine sea salt
- ¼ to ½ cup walnut pieces (optional)
- ¼ to ½ cup dark chocolate chips (optional)
- ¼ to ½ cup hemp hearts
Directions
- Heat oven to 350. Line a 5×9 loaf pan with parchment paper.
- In a large bowl, whisk together the mashed banana, melted oil, honey, maple syrup, chia seeds, eggs and vanilla; beat well.
- Add the oat flour, baking powder and salt; mix until combined. Fold in the nuts, and/or chips, if using.
- Pour batter into the prepared pan. Sprinkle the hemp hearts over the top until completely covered (alternatively you could stir the hemp hearts into the bread along with the ground oats).
- Bake for 70 minutes. Let cool completely before cutting.
Enjoy!
To deliciously healthy food and stronger faster running… Cheers,
Sarah J Cuff, RHN
Comments 8
As person with type 1 diabetes, how could I substitute coconut palm sugar instead of maple syrup and honey?
Author
Hi Julia… For sure this is easy done 🙂 Just remove the 1/4 cup each of honey, maple syrup and chia seeds, increase oil used to 1/2 cup, and add 3/4 cup of coconut sugar. I’ve made it many times this way, and turns out perfect. However, as a side note, everyone metabolizes coconut palm sugar differently and for some the glycemic index for coconut sugar may not be all that different from regular sugar. So I’d just account for it the same way you would all carbohydrates, and coconut sugar contains 12g carb per tablespoon just like all sugars do. Cheers! -sarah
thanks sarah! i just saw this now! going to start baking, and thanks for the tips about coconut palm sugar and carb counting, this is my first time using it!
hi Sarah! made the banana bread… it turned out perfect.. thanks again!
My loaf is baking in the oven as I right! It will help in my carb loading efforts for the BMO this weekend!
Your reply to Julie is very interesting and I’d like to try making it! However, I’m curious to know if you could keep the chia seeds and cut back the coconut sugar by that 1/4cup ( since it seems to be replacing the sugar you’ve eliminated)?
… Wondering why the chia seeds get cut, I guess, and thinking they would give a good texture to the loaf!
Author
Good question Gisele! My original recipe used only sugar and no chia… I made it for ages. Then when I kicked sugar out of my kitchen I was struck with challenges on how to replace sugar with liquid sweeteners! Chia helped overcome that as it’s so great in sucking up liquid. So I suppose you could have chia in the sugar version… But you’d probably need to add some more liquid somewhere so the final product didn’t come out too dry… Hope yours turned out and hope you had a great race!!!
Hi, can this be frozen? Thanks. T
Author
Yes absolutely. It freezes well actually!