Banana Walnut Cake (Gluten and Dairy Free)

Here's my recipe for a delicious gluten and dairy free banana walnut cake, made with 2 bananas and walnut butter. It's soft, delicious, and rustic. It has a slightly lighter and runnier mixture than my banana loaf, giving it more of a cake texture, but it still has that nice banana loaf crust. This is a super easy one-bowl cake recipe that will be an all round crowd pleaser ... except for maybe the 2 people I've met in my life that don't like bananas.

Filling/Icing

For this recipe today I haven't included a filling or icing recipe as if is totally customisable, and even enjoyable eaten by itself. However in the pictures, I used my vanilla cashew cream recipe which will be available for you shortly! Another option would be just to make a classic buttercream, with vegan butter and icing sugar, this could be flavoured with walnut butter, cinnamon, or even some nutmeg!

INGREDIENTS

Most of these items are normal gluten free cupboard ingredients, however if you don't have gluten free self raising flour, just add 2 tsp of baking powder and that should work fine!

I use the vegan butter brand called Naturli for most of my vegan bakes, but I find Pure really good as well.

The other ingredient that might not so common is walnut butter, what you want to be looking for is basically as close to pure ground peanuts you can get. You can usually find this in health food or organic stores if there is none in your local supermarket. In this recipe I used the Green Sparrow Foods smooth walnut butter that I actually made this recipe for, it's pure walnuts, with absolutely nothing added.

If you'd like to make this cake refined sugar free - I would suggest replacing the caster sugar with coconut sugar, it has a really delicious earthy sweetness that goes well with the flavours. A 1:1 switch should be fine.

Equipment

For this recipe you will need a hand beater or a whisk and strong arms, a 9 inch cake tin, and a spatula. I also measure my ingredients with an electronic scale, but this recipe doesn't need to be too accurate to work.

I N G R E D I E N T S

• 80 grams of vegan butter

• 80 grams of caster sugar

• 2 eggs

• 2 bananas (mashed)

• 1 tsp cinnamon

• 225 grams of gluten free self raising flour

• 1/4 tsp of xanthan gum

• Pinch of salt

• 1/4 cup of walnut butter

M E T H O D

1. Preheat the oven to 220° Celsius on Bake. Line a circle baking tin, around 9-inch in diameter with baking paper.

2. In a large bowl, cream together the vegan butter and sugar until light and creamy.

3. Then, add in the mashed banana and eggs and beat briefly to combine.

4. Sift in the cinnamon, self raising flour, xanthan gum, and salt and then hand mix to combine.

5. Fold in the walnut butter.

6. Pour the cake mixture into the tin and level it with a spatula.

7. Bake in the oven for 30 minutes or until a skewer inserted into the middle comes out clean.

8. Let the cake cool completely before slicing in half and icing.

9. There are a couple of options for the icing for this cake - in these pictures I used my vegan cashew butter cream (recipe available shortly)

10. Top with walnuts and icing sugar and store in a container for 2 days. This cake is best kept out of the fridge, and stored in a cupboard.