Guilt-Free Banana Bread

(gluten-free, refined sugar free, can be dairy free)

I love banana bread. It's one of my comfort foods of choice.
Perfect for breakfast, sweet enough for dessert...it’s all around just a good thing.
Except that usually, it’s full of a lot of not good things, like white flour, vegetable oil, refined sugar, and so on.
Unless of course, you get around that, and create something that’s more like a real bread and less like a post-breakup-meltdown-indulgence.

I found this recipe a few years ago when I was looking for a gluten-free banana bread recipe. It turned out great, but it still had quite a few things that, now, as I’ve refined my diet quite a bit, I don’t want to be cooking with.

So, this recipe was born- just a healthier, guiltless, but still really delicious version of the original. No gluten, no refined sugar, and only healthy fats.

The thing I love most about this is that, unlike a lot of other gluten-free breads, this banana bread is moist and dense- not at all crumbly or grainy. It’s also naturally sweetened from the honey, applesauce and bananas, but the sweetness isn’t so overwhelming as it can be in banana breads sometimes.

I’m pretty picky about my bread. This one passes the test!

Guilt-Free Banana Bread

Dry:
2 cups all-purpose gluten-free flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp. salt

Wet:
2 cups mashed ripe bananas
1/2 cup organic applesauce
3/4 cup raw honey
1 tsp vanilla
4 eggs, whisked
1/3 cup grass-fed butter, softened (you can sub coconut oil)

Preheat oven to 350ºF.
Grease a loaf pan with butter or coconut oil and set aside.

In a standing mixer, combine flour, baking soda and salt. Set aside.

In a large bowl, mash bananas until very creamy, but not completely smooth (you want a few lumps in there!). Add applesauce, honey, vanilla and whisked eggs and stir. Add in softened butter and mix well.

Pour wet ingredients into the standing mixer, and turn mixer on low to stir. Once the dry ingredients have blended with the wet a little, turn the mixer higher and beat until the batter is mostly smooth.

[You can stir in walnuts or chocolate chips here if you so desire. I’m not fond of chunks in my banana bread, so I did without.]

Pour batter into the greased loaf pan.
The batter should fill up 1/2 to 3/4 of the pan at most. If you have extra batter, you can make a couple of banana bread muffins by pouring it into cupcake tins.

[Here, my pregnancy cravings got the best of me, and I threw together a streusel topping out of brown sugar, whole oats and butter. I’m not including this for two reasons- it kind of  defeats the purpose of making it healthy, and I have no idea how much of any ingredient I used anyway.] 

Bake for 45-55 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center of the bread comes out clean.

Let stand at room temperature. This is great warm or refrigerated, but I love it most at room temperature. Store in an airtight container and enjoy at your leisure. :)