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#Nojunk bean chocolate cake

Posted on April 28, 2014 | 18 comments

“I pledge to eat and feed my family only real ingredients I can recognise or spell.”

Last week, I signed the Organix #nojunk pledge because children need real food – not additives, fillers or artificial processes that produce profits for food manufacturers yet ill health for our children.

Is this right? NO!

Last week’s blog was about Organix, its pioneering ethos and why organic standards protect our children’s healthy by banning the nasties.

I promised a #nojunk cake and here it is.

The recipe is thanks to Olea’s mum. Olea and my granddaughter Tayda are schoolchums. After I had contributed a wheat-free raw date and lemon cake to my granddaughter’s 5th birthday party, Olea’s mum wrote out there-and-then a healthy wheat-free recipe (see pic) using…beans.

I am a big fan of beans thanks to The Bean Book by Rose Elliot, my cooking bible when my own children were little in the 1980s.

Healthy beans

Beans are seeds, a plant’s future offspring. They spill on the soil where they wait for the right conditions to germinate. Their food reserves support this process and is also good for us when we eat them. Packed with protein, vitamins and minerals, beans are nutritional powerhouses.

Big yet compact, their plentiful food stores are low-fat and high-energy. They quieten sugar-levels because of their high-fibre – the soluble sort that gently coats the gut and is slow-acting – and have high-levels of cancer-busting antioxidants. (Above from my intro on beans in Make More of Peas and Beans).

Olea’s mum’s #nojunk bean cake

The cast assembled (clockwise from top): eggs, pot of honey, melted chocolate over a drained tin of butter beans, ground almonds with baking powder and melted butter.

Blend up:

1 tin of cooked beans (butter/kidney/black – unsalted, drained)
4 eggs
100 – 150g ground almonds
6 tablespoons of coconut oil or (melted) butter
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda plus natural flavouring (spice, essence, ginger, vanilla etc)
1/2 cup sweetener

Lightly grease baking tin. Bake 180° 30 – 40 mins-ish.

I omitted the 1/2 tsp of baking powder, using instead an extra egg (5 eggs in total). I used organic eggs and butter for extra nutritional value (and guaranteed high animal welfare standards). As sweetener, I used half a jar of honey for low-glycemic slow release sweetness (no one noticed honey taste at all).

For flavouring, I used a 150g bar of Green & Black’s organic dark chocolate, melted in a pan over another pan of boiling water, and blended into the cake mix. I also dribbled melted Green & Black’s chocolate on the cooled cake.

I blended all the ingredients together with my trusty £20 hand-blender and poured the cake mixture into a fluted tin that once belonged to my grandmother. (When my mother gave me her cake tins recently, she said: “It feels like the royal abdication.”).

I served the cake with Biona organic sour cherries from a jar for the adults.

Everyone who tasted the cake pronounced it a success.

And no one guessed the mystery ingredient was healthy wholefood beans!

And….Join the #NoJunk Challenge!

Hey, I have just entered this blog post in the Organix #NoJunk Challenge Blog Hop…fingers crossed!

18 Comments

Posted in food, health, organic, recipe, sustainable, vegetarian

Tagged beans, campaign, chocolate cake, healthy, organic, Organix, wheat-free, wholefood

Pecan banana bread made with ground nuts not flour

Posted on November 30, 2011 | 24 comments

Banana bread + organic creme fraiche + Better Food Spicy Apple and Citrus Preserve

Experiment: Spoke a first draft instead of writing it. Took me five minutes. Could this be the way forward?

Here is what I said (with few amends).

Due to a delicate digestion, I think a lot about how I feel after what I have eaten.

The food is delicious. But how does it sit in my gut?

So I was interested to read in Natural Lifestyle an article by nutritionist Christine Bailey about healing the inflamed gut. A new idea. Is it possible?

The article recommended homemade yogurt (I am a believer), and well-cooked vegetables with meat broth, avoiding all grains.

The article gave a recipe for banana bread using ground pecan nuts instead of flour. No sugar. Honey instead.

Finding-out how to grind the nuts was a mission.

I even bought a new hand blender. I drove myself and the assistant at Kitchens mad questioning the nut-grinding function of every machine and found all nuts when ground eventually go to a paste because of the heat.

So it seemed nut-grinding might be a Shangri-La illusion.

So I bought my £30 Philips hand blender with a grinding attachment and further research found freezing the nuts might stop them getting too oily too fast.

I froze the nuts. I used the nut blender attachment, I found with short burts and not expecting too much fineness, I ground the nuts. It worked.

Pecan nuts are more expensive than flour. Nuts are more expensive than flour.

Here is Christine Bailey‘s recipe. I changed it: got rid of the baking agents, using eggs to make it rise, and two bananas instead of one. It filled one small and one big loaf tin. You could substitute the pecans for other ground nuts.

Grind/blend 10 1/2 oz (300g) frozen pecan nuts. A cinnamon stick adds grit to oily nuts. Add 2 tsp ground cinnamon to ground nuts. Whizz four eggs until airy then whizz with two tablespoons of olive oil (I used melted ghee butter) and one large or two small ripe banana until airy and smooth. Combine gently with nuts and cinnamon. Pour into two oiled loaf tins. Bake 180C Gas Mark 4 for 40 minutes until firm to touch.

The banana bread tasted a bit worthy and I did go non-vegan spreading it with organic butter.

It must be noted, it was easy to eat, not sickly-eating sweetness

and afterwards my gut felt good.

It would not have been so happy with the grain.

The banana bread is a keeper but it does need a spread and I wonder what you might add to luxuriate the baked bread.

And have you grappled with nut-grinding?