Decadent Dairy Free Banana Cake

When I started making packed lunches I naively hoped to be the kind of mother who lovingly shapes their offspring’s sandwiches into dinosaurs and creates works of art from a few pieces of carrot and pepper, however the reality is quite different. When scrabbling around an empty fridge minutes before you need to run out of the door, food sculptures aren’t really top of the list of priorities! Despite this, I’d like to think I provide a nice variation of nutritious food – most of which get eaten. However this week, despite being assured that bananas were definitely a favourite fruit, yesterday afternoon, I discovered not one but three uneaten bananas amongst the school paraphernalia. They were all past their best, but, not wanting to be wasteful, I took it as a sign to bake some cakes.

Due to allergies, our cakes are always egg and dairy free and banana is a great egg replacer. Plus, banana cake is delicious. I love this recipe as everything gets poured into the bowl at the same time so there’s no faffing around with creaming ingredients and sticking to a strict method.

The cake tastes amazing on its own, or, if you’re feeling decadent like us you could finish it off with dairy free cream cheese frosting or chocolate topping, delicious!

Ingredients…

(Makes one 8 inch cake and 12 large cupcakes)

1.5 cups (American) self-raising flour

1.5 cups (American) wholemeal self-raising flour

1 cup (American) brown sugar

3 tsp baking powder

2 tsp cinnamon

3 mashed bananas

1 cup rapeseed oil

1 cup dairy free milk (we used koko)

Cream cheese frosting

(Will frost 12 cupcakes)

150g dairy free cream cheese (we used Violife)

75g dairy free spread

2 tbs caster sugar

Chocolate topping

125g icing sugar

1 tbs cocoa

1.5 tbs dairy free milk (we used Koko)

25g melted dairy free spread

How to…

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C/160°C. Grease and line two round, 8 inch baking tins. Place all the dry ingredients in a big mixing bowl and combine.
2. Add the wet ingredients and stir well. Fill 12 cupcake cases and the baking tins with the mixture then bake for approximately 15 minutes until slightly brown and springy on top. Allow to cool before adding icing
3. For the cream cheese frosting, mix the butter and cream cheese together then stir in the sugar.
4. For the chocolate topping, stir the icing sugar and cocoa together then add the melted spread and milk until thoroughly combined.