Breakfast Desserts

Vegan Chocolate Banana Bread (GF + Refined Sugar-Free)

Today I’m bringing you my recipe for vegan chocolate banana bread. This version happens to be gluten free, refined sugar free and as moist as can be. So all guilt aside, let’s jump right in.

Jump to Recipe

Gluten Free Flour

If you’ve see my post of the vegan pumpkin bread, you’ll know that my go to gluten-free bread for baking is oat flour. I love how minimally processed it is (you can just blend your regular oats in a good blender or coffee grinder in order to obtain the flour). Plus oats are known to be incredibly nutritious, rich in anti-oxidants, they also contain an amazing soluble fiber known as beta-glucan which helps reduce blood sugar and LDL (bad) cholesterol. Honestly, the health benefits are endless, so you can understand my obsession for oats in baking.

Adding Moisture to Gluten-Free Flour

To avoid finding ourselves with a very dry vegan gluten-free chocolate banana bread, we need to add moisture into the oat flour. So the reasonable solution would be to add some type of moisture like oils or butters. However, pureed fruits like, apple or very ripe banana (which I used both of those in this recipe) act the same way as oil or butter. Hence, using banana in this recipe helps make this chocolate banana bread much lower in fat.

Sugar Replacement

Now it is totally up to you if you want to use a sugar replacement or not. There are mixed views about using sugar replacements, but if you want to maintain your sugar levels low, these come in very handy. So for this recipe I used a mix of organic stevia and erythritol. I thing mixing the two together gives the overall banana bread a more natural sweetness level without the after taste that usually comes with sugar replacements in general.

Making the Vegan Gluten-Free Chocolate Banana Bread

First let’s preheat our oven at 400F and on small container or bowl add your plant based milk of choice, followed by some apple cider vinegar. Whisk and set it aside.

Wet Ingredients

Next, on a large mixing bowl, add your very ripe bananas that you’re going to use a fork to mash until they become creamy. This will be the base for our wet ingredients.

Then, add some unsweetened apple sauce, the milk and apple cider vinegar mix, the coconut oil, and some rum extract. Give everything a mix. Then add your sweetener of choice, again here I went for stevia and some erythritol. Adding these two together helps lessen the funny after taste of the zero calorie sweeteners. Set your wet ingredients aside and work on your dry ingredients.

Dry Ingredients

On a separate bowl add the oat flour, unsweetened cocoa powder, baking powder, baking soda, salt and cinnamon. Use a whisk to mix everything making sure to break any lump.

Combining the Dry and Wet Ingredients

Now we can add the dry ingredients to the wet and use a spatula to mix the batter. Once the batter is well mixed, slightly grease a cake pan.

Mine is a 13 inch non-stick loaf pan. And pour in the batter, making sure everything is leveled. Pop it in the oven and let it bake for about an hour and 15 minutes, or until you can stick a knife in and it comes out dry.
This size is perfect for a large family and it’s great as a meal prep. Now it looks good as it is, but we’re going to take it a step further, by adding some icing on top.

Vegan Icing (Optional)

To make the icing, we’ll add some coconut cream (left in the fridge for at least 4 hours) in a mixing bowl. Make sure to only add the creamy part of the cream. It’s important not to add the liquid part to the recipe.

Next, add your sweetener of choice. I went for stevia and erythritol. Folowed with lime juice, and rum extract, vanilla extract would work really well too.
Then use a hand mixer to mix everything until the icing become creamy.

Next spread the icing on the top of the our cake, now make sure your cake has completely cooled down before adding the icing else, the icing will melt completely.
And our Vegan Chocolate Banana Bread is ready. This looks like it should be an indulgence, but it’s not. We get some healthy carbs with the oat flour, bananas and apple sauce, no refined sugar whatsoever, no dairy and very low fat. Really this is just all goodness. Enjoy!

***The Mushroom Den earns a small commission if you make a purchase using any of the affiliate links listed on this post. We only suggest products we believe in, so hopefully you like them too.