Gluten Free and Vegan Chocolate Chunk Almond Butter Banana Bread and French Toast

I'm pretty sure it must be a written rule somewhere that if it's a rainy day and you have ripe bananas, you need to make banana bread. Well, at least it should be a rule. Baking and rainy days are pretty much a must, and ripe bananas obviously mean banana bread. So banana bread it was!

I recently started using the Neat Egg (as I mentioned previously) as an egg replacement in some of my recipes. It has actually been wonderful! I'm not personally vegan, but my mom is. So it's nice to be able to bake something that I can actually offer her a piece of. Plus, you really can't even tell that there isn't an egg in the recipe, so the non-vegans will never know. 

I was fortunate enough to be able to team up with Neat over on my Instagram to give one lucky winner a full Neat prize pack which includes the Neat Egg and two Neat meat replacement mixes (original and Mexican). You still have a little time to enter (about 2 hours), so go check it out! In the meantime, let's get to the recipe!

Here's What You'll Need:

-3 ripe bananas
-1 Neat Egg
-1 1/2 cup unsweetened almond milk
-3 tbsp Gone Nuts Date Me almond butter
-1 cup coconut flour
-1 tbsp baking powder
-Pinch of sea salt
-1/2 of a 3 oz dark chocolate bar (I used an 88% cocoa bar, but that may be a bit bitter for some. Use whatever you like), broken into small chunks

Instructions:

1) Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.
2) Using a small hand mixer (or a KitchenAid style mixer works just as well),  mix together all of the ingredients except the chocolate chunks.
3) Fold the chocolate chunks into the mixture using a wooden spoon.
4) Pour the mix into a loaf pan that is either lined with parchment or sprayed with nonstick spray.
5) Bake for about 1 hour. Ovens may vary, so keep an eye on the bread. When it's ready the top should be golden brown.
6) Remove the bread from the oven, and let it cool completely before removing it from the pan.
7) Once cool, you can remove the bread and slice it.
8) Top with some additional Gone Nuts or the toppings of your choice, and enjoy!

A few things about the bread, there aren't a lot of added sweeteners like sugar or maple syrup because the Gone Nuts almond butter contains dates, vanilla, and coconut oil. If you're swapping out for a different brand, especially an unsweetened almond butter, definitely take this into consideration. I also didn't want an overly sweet bread because you can always add more almond butter or sweet toppings, but you can't take it out. If you prefer really sweet, feel free to add in some maple syrup or the sweetener of your choosing!

I also ended up using the bread to make some delicious gluten free and vegan French toast which I highly recommend! All you need is about 1/2 cup unsweetened almond milk, 1 tsp maple syrup, 1 tsp quinoa flour, 2 tsp nutritional yeast, and 1/2 tsp of cinnamon. Mix it all together in a bowl, and dip the banana bread slices into the mixture. Cook the slices in a pan on the stove top over medium to medium high heat, flipping half way through until each side is a golden brown. I topped mine with some maple syrup and more Gone Nuts, and it was SO GOOD.

Let me know if you give it a try and what you think in the comments below!

Gluten Free Banana Chocolate Chunk Muffins

There are a number of things that made me want to make these muffins. 1) I've been a banana bread kick (especially if it involves chocolate) 2) I had very, very brown bananas, and most importantly 3) I recently found out that someone in one of my best friend's family was recently diagnosed with a severe case of Celiac Disease. 

I recently learned a lot about Celiac Disease through the course I'm taking at IIN (ask me about it or click on the health coaching tab if you want to know more about the program). I'm by no means an expert, but my friend reached out to me to see if I knew of any food companies, bloggers, foods that were specifically gluten free. This along with just learning about and hearing other Celiac stories through my program made me want to go with a gluten free recipe.

I can't imagine what it's like to get that diagnosis, but there are really some great people, products, companies, and recipes that make the necessary transition to gluten free a little easier. So I was hoping to contribute just a teeny tiny recipe in the grand scheme of things to prove that you can still eat some damn good baked goods.

The recipe is also dairy free for my dairy-intolerant or just nondairy eaters and readers out there.

Here's What You'll Need:

-1 cup coconut flour
-1/2 tsp baking soda
-Pinch of sea salt
-2 bananas
-2 tbsp honey
-1 tsp vanilla
-1 tbsp coconut oil (melted)
-1 egg
-4 oz plain Kite Hill almond milk yogurt
-1/4 cup unsweetened almond milk
-1/2 dark chocolate bar (ideally at least 70% cacao), broken into small chunks

Instructions:

1) Preheat your oven to 350 degrees, and spray an 8+ cup muffin tin with cooking spray (the recipe yields 8 muffins). I use coconut oil cooking spray.
2) Mix together the dry ingredients (coconut flour, baking soda, and sea salt).
3) Mix together the bananas, honey, vanilla, coconut oil, egg, yogurt, and almond milk using a hand mixer until all ingredients are well combined and the batter is smooth.
4) Mix the wet ingredients into the dry mixture.
5) Fold in chocolate chunks, and mix until evenly distributed.
6) Evenly divide the batter between 8 cups of the muffin tin.
7) Cook the muffins in the oven for 25 minutes (or until a toothpick comes out clean).
8) Let them cool for about 5 minutes, and then remove them from the tin.
9) Enjoy!

You can easily reheat these if you're eating them the next day. Actually, I recommend it! They're so delicious with that gooey chocolate. Let me know what you think!