Here's my entry to the #happybirthdaycontest held by the spectacular birthday girl @vegan.niinja.

I choose to made the humble banana bread cake. This is always my staple cake mainly because it doesn't require much sugar and I normally have loads of surplus ripe bananas lying around.

I make all my cakes gluten and wheat free, this one is nut based and consider it to be fairly healthy!

It's always best to use the ripest bananas for ease of mashing and maximum banana flavor.

Ingredients

Ripe bananas mashed
Chia egg
coconut sugar
1 tsbp baking powder
1 tsp himalaya salt
homemade almond milk (200g almonds)
and the left over almond pulp
chopped walnuts (200g)
Carob or cacao for dusting on top ( i used carob)
chopped almond for sprinkling on top

I don't have an oven but I do have a bread maker that has a cake setting, this is the first time trying it out so I wasn't sure how long to set it. It needed at least 1 hour and a half in the end because my cake was very moist. I was hoping it would rise a bit more but I don't make cakes often so maybe it was too dense or just that the bread maker isn't hot enough for this mixture.... any tips for me let me know!

Whilst the mixture was baking away in the bread maker, I started melting some chocolate, these were chocolates I had previous made and have stored in the refrigerator. I used a ban Marie and heated them gently (to keep the cacao officially raw) then I remolded them to make these cute little gems and stars chocolate decorations.

You can check out my full raw chocolate recipe here....

You can leave them to let them cool down at room temperature or pop them in the fridge to make it quicker. They were all set by the time the cake was done, which did take a while but the good thing about a bread maker is there isn't really a risk of burning the cake. A bread maker is fairly low consumption on power a 1 hr program is around 0.5kw whereas an average modern oven is around 2.4kw. I didn't decide by choice not to have an oven just I don't have a working one in my apartment but I don't mind as it does save me money on my electricity bills. In hindsight it seems ridiculous to heat up a large oven for the sake of using one tray/ one shelf. I think compact ovens would be more ideal for apartments

After taking the banana bread out of the oven I sprinkled some of the chocolate gems on top, they start to melt into the cake which adds an extra element of deliciousness. The cake is pretty much all eaten already because its guilt free and healthy there was nothing really to hold me back.