Friday, February 17, 2012

Easy Vegan Chocolate Banana Bread

I've had seven spent bananas sitting in my freezer for nearly a month.  I kept telling myself that I was going to make banana bread.  I WAS GOING TO DO IT.

Yesterday, I finally did.  It's pretty darn good.  I actually think the batter tasted better than the bread itself (not something I usually find true).  But, the bread (cold, with a tiny smearing of Earth Balance on it) it pretty great, too.  I like this recipe, as it's not ridiculously sweet.  It has a decent amount of sugar, but not as much as in many quick bread recipes.

The recipe comes from Isa Chandra on Post Punk Kitchen.  Per loaf:

1/2 c brown sugar
1/2 c white sugar 
(if you're trying to be a good vegan, as I am, try to use unrefined sugar, the refining process is a little horrifying)
1/2 c margarine 
(room temperature or slightly melty)
3 very ripe bananas
(mashed well, I used 7 bananas for 2 loaves)
2 c flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 c vanilla soy milk curdled with 1 tsp apple cider vinegar
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp allspice
(I subbed 1/2 tsp cardamom here)
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 c cocoa powder (my own addition)

Preheat oven to 350 and lightly oil your bread pan.  Cream margarine and sugars together.  Add bananas and curdled soy milk to the sugar mixture.  Sift/wisk together the dry ingredients.  Add wet ingredients to dry and mix very well.  Fill your bread pan (it'll rise about 1- 1.5 inches).  Bake for 50 minutes to 1 hour 10 depending on how psychotic you oven is.

Quick breads are very likely the easiest baked thing to veganize as bananas are an effective egg replacer.


Thawed banana (pre-mushing).  You should have seen it coming out of the peel...


I'm not usually a batter eater, but this stuff tasted like chocolate frozen bananas.


Super moist and awesome for breakfast of with vegan ice cream (bonus points for sprinkling the ice cream with cardamom).

What are your favorite quick breads?

4 comments:

  1. Looks totally yummO. The photo is great! One of my fave quick breads is Cranberry, chocolate , walnut bread. You leave the cranberries uncooked and whole, and leave the chocolate in big chunks. Really yummO!

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  2. Man, I love the PPK. I have bananas right now, maybe I'll make this bread sometime this week. I am currently out of any kind of granulated sugar, so I've been using a bit of agave in my baking. I tried to get some sugar at the coop but they don't have any. Isn't that weird? They had granulated fructose though. Have you heard anything about that?

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  3. Fructose is a part of sugar, it reacts differently in baked goods (I think) Some people use it to make jam, you can use less of it, but you also have to use a different pectin to get it to set up.

    This banana bread is awesome, Casey gave me a piece when I was down there earlier this week

    YummO

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  4. I think the fructose is, maybe, fractured sugar? As in, it's molecular structure is different, so baking might be weird. But, I don't have solid ground on that at all. You could totally use agave or maple syrup or something like that in this. As soon as I run out of granulated white sugar, I'm going to switch to raw sugars because I've heard some pretty terrible things about sugar refining practices (like the use of animal bone fragments).

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