Banana Bread

When I first started eating like a health freak, I'd eat beans, salad, carrot juice and then I'd eat one of my homemade chocolate chip cookies. They were SO good. Soft with all that fabulous butter and sweet loaded with sugar. I had perfected them. Suddenly all that good food I'd put inside of my body was worth nothing. The cookie (or rather, three of them) had put me back to square one. I was so discouraged. I wished there was such a thing as gluten, dairy and sugar free baked goodies. 'Cause really, is life without desserts worth living? 

Enter Babycakes NYC. They are the REASON I am able to be vegan. I would never have committed to this lifestyle if it didn't come with perks. Let me tell you something about Babycakes, you can't tell it's lacking white flour, processed sugar or butter. Amazing!

Here is Thérèse and I last year at Babycakes NYC's Los Angeles Grand Opening with the genius behind these delicious treats, Erin McKenna. 

Look at those cupcakes! Voted best cupcakes in all of NYC. 

Why Gluten-Free? Gluten includes white and wheat flour. The problem with gluten is that it is popping up in everything. They shove wheat in nearly all packaged foods. Because we are getting an overload of gluten, our bodies are building up an intolerance to them. Our kitchen isn't 100% gluten-free, but we do avoid them. One way we do this is by eating rice pasta and Ezekiel Bread, which does contain wheat but not processed. Eating something in their true form is always the best. 

Back to the good stuff. The first Babycakes recipe I conquered was their Banana Bread. 

Babycakes made this nice video to help out new bakers. I wish I had had this when I was learning!

BabyCakes NYC: Some Baking Tips! from BabyCakes NYC on Vimeo.

 Anytime I have black bananas I pop them in my fridge so I can make bread or shakes with them later. Today I halved the recipe since I didn't have enough bananas. Also, this should be eaten in about three days. I don't like making more than we can eat.

My new favorite way to make this is by smothering the batter about an inch thick on parchment paper. I love it this way because one, I'm obsessed with the crust, this makes every piece be a crust, and two, it only takes ten minutes to bake. I kept mine in for fifteen minutes till the toothpick came out clean. Oven temperatures and time vary, over time you will figure out about how much time you should leave your baked goods in. 

Here is my assistant baker first thing this morning still in her PJ's. Since the batter contains no raw eggs we don't have to worry about salmonella poisoning. Hooray! 

Often I'll throw in chocolate chips or chopped walnuts. Today I made it plain so we could smear some nut butter on instead. 

Yummy! These are soft, moist and sweet. Thank you Babycakes! 

I'll definitely be sharing more from Babycakes in the future. We can't get enough of them here!