Vegan Breakfast Banana Cake

A recipe for those old bananas that look like they are destined for the compost heap. This recipe takes inspiration from a muesli bowl and is great served with a dollop of yoghurt.

I am one of those people who rarely eats breakfast, but I started making these for my boyfriend after working from home became a fairly permanent feature of life and he no longer needed the practicality of granola in a Tupperware pot for breakfast every day. Since this one, there have been several renditions of Breakfast Cake featuring different fruits, nuts and seeds, but I have a real soft spot for the original. I have done my best to make this recipe nutritionally significant by cramming in oats, adding as much fruit as possible, cutting down the amount of added sugar and substituting the egg for chia seeds.

I often find myself wandering in to vegan baking simply because eggs and butter seem to be the first baking ingredients that I run out of and I like to make the best of what I already have. It is also much easier to call this a breakfast cake when I don't have to justify the presence of large quantities of butter! I also only ever have oat milk in the house because my other half is weirdly squeamish about cow milk, but if it is more convenient for you and you don't care if the recipe is vegan or not then go ahead and use regular milk.

I bake this in a circular cake tin because my oven does not follow the regular laws of thermo-dynamics and this is the only way I can cook it evenly. The oven cannot distribute heat and ends up grilling from underneath while the top of the oven is always the coolest part, so flatter shapes work best for me.

This cake cuts into 12 serves and freezes really well. In fact this usually gets frozen into individual slices to be pulled out when desired. Once defrosted, it can be warmed in the microwave for 20 seconds if that's your thing.

THINGS YOU WILL NEED

Non-stick spring cake tin

Wooden spoon

Spatula

2 mixing bowls

Fork

INGREDIENTS

100g Jumbo Oats (big ones with texture, not rolled oats)

230g Old Bananas

50g Brown Sugar (this doesn't sound like a lot, but the bananas will also be really sweet)

200g Plain Flour

10g (1 heaped tsp) Baking Powder

50g Pecans

1 tsp Vanilla Extract

15g (1 heaped tbsp) Chia Seeds

225g Oat Milk

60ml Vegetable Oil

Pinch of salt

1) To the chia seeds, add 50ml oat milk and leave for half an hour. This is an eye-opener if you have never used chia seeds in this capacity before, because they end up resembling frogspawn. Roughly chop and roast the pecans lightly.

The before...

...and after

2) Preheat the oven to 190 decrees Celsius. Sprinkle a big handful, roughly 20g, of oats and a quarter of the pecans at the bottom of the cake tin. This will help you to get the cake out at the end and makes a pretty cake topping.

3) In one of the mixing bowls, whisk together the flour, salt and baking powder so it is evenly distributed. Add the oil and mix until it comes together in crumbs. Add the oats and sugar to that and combine it all with your hands until it mixes evenly and resembles a sandy texture.

4) In another mixing bowl, crush the bananas with the back of a spoon. Add the chia seeds and remaining 175g oat milk and stir into a sort of pancake batter consistency.

5) Add the banana mixture to the flour bowl and gently stir together. Add the pecans and vanilla before pouring into the prepared cake tin.

6) Bake for around 45 minutes and then check on it. If it is making a fairly obvious whistling noise then it is still too wet inside, so leave it in for 10 more minutes or until the whistling noise is quiet enough that you really have to strain to hear it.

7) Take it out of the oven and leave it to cool for around 20 minutes. Take it out of the tin ring and flip it onto a plate. Free the edge of the tin base with a knife and then it should easily slide away thanks to the oats you sprinkled at the beginning.

8) Leave to cool completely before cutting. Enjoy for breakfast with a big dollop of yoghurt, or warm in the microwave for 20 seconds before serving.