Sugar-Free Banana Bread

Banana bread has to be one of my favourite types of loaf cake. I love how moist the cake is and that you can add in pretty much anything you like such as chocolate, dried fruit or nuts. Instead of using sugar in this recipe, I replaced the ingredient with dates. Medjool dates are the best for baking, however I used the dried, stoned dates by Whitworths which worked fine as long as I had let them soak in some water for a while. Although the title of this post says that they're sugar-free, my dark chocolate chip loaf obviously isn't, however, my walnut version is. 

Ingredients
- 3 ripe bananas
- 175g ground almonds
- 150g self raising flour 
- 75g butter
- 1 tbsp cinnamon
- 1 tsp nutmeg
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 3 medjool dates (72g stoned dates)
- 50g of optional dried fruit, nuts, chocolate etc.
- Handful of flaked almonds (Optional)

Method
1) Remove any stones and place dates in a bowl of water if they're hard.
2) Mix the ground almonds, flour, cinnamon and nutmeg.
3) Add in any optional extras. 
4) Melt the butter in the oven on gas mark 4 in an oven proof dish or mug. 
5) Mash the dates to form a paste and add the bananas and mash together. 
6) Add the vanilla to the mashed banana and dates.
7) Remove the melted butter from the oven and add to the banana mixture. 
8) Pour the wet and dry mixture together and combine. 
9) Evenly distribute the banana bread batter between two loaf tins and sprinkle with a handful of flaked almonds or any other extra you wish (I used chopped walnuts on one and dark chocolate chips on the other).
10) Bake for 30-35 minutes. Poke with a sharp knife or cocktail stick and remove, if clean, the loafs are cooked. 
11) Remove from the tins and place on a cooling rack. 
12) Let the loafs cool before slicing. 

I hope you enjoyed this recipe post, stay around for another next Sunday! :) 

Becky x

Oat Cookies

I'm coming to you from my bed, full of cold, with a recipe which I came up with for oat cookies!

Oat foods definitely remind me of the cold autumn and winter weather, especially hot porridge on a freezing morning. This recipe is very versatile and you can add any flavourings or extras as you please. Have fun experimenting! 

What you'll need...

- 75g  self raising flour

- 75g porridge oats

- 75g brown sugar

-75g butter

- 1 tbsp honey

- 1 tbsp milk

To start with I set my oven to gas mark 4 and I weighed out the flour, sugar and oats and put them into a mixing bowl.

The next step involves weighing out your 75g of butter, honey and milk and melting it on a low heat in a saucepan.

The melted butter combination then goes into the dry mixture. 

Then combine this all together using a wooden spoon in your mixing bowl.

I found it much less messy using a spoon to shape the cookies before putting them onto a lined baking tray ready to be put in the preheated oven.

I only did this to half of the mixture and then added in some walnut pieces to the remaining mixture in the bowl and combined it together. 

I popped these in the oven for about 15 minutes because they were quite large. If you make them slightly smaller, they probably won't take as long and vise versa. I knew that these were done because they had become partly golden brown, hardened a little and expanded slightly.

I recommend leaving these to cool for a while so that they become set and less flimsy.

I hope you enjoyed this post, look out for more in the future! :) 

Becky x