Gluten-Free Banana Bread

Today I noticed I had a bunch of bananas that were getting way to ripe for my liking. Usually one or two of those end up lingering around and they get tossed into a protein shake and all is well. However this time I had about 6 of them so I needed to come up with a better solution.

I ended up doing a web search for gluten-free banana recipes (as many of you may recall, I am doing the cleanse from Tony Horton's book Bring It!, in which gluten is one of the things you wean yourself off of during the 3o day period) and I was happy to come across this recipe on a website called "Book of Yum".

As usual, I tweaked the recipe just a little bit by using apple sauce instead of oil. I also didn't want to wait until tomorrow to make this, so I used 3/4 cups of sugar, 1/4 cup light brown sugar and 1 tbsp of vanilla extract instead.

The bread was very simple to make, made the whole house smell wonderful during the cooking process and was wonderfully moist and flavorful.

As a matter of fact, my kids even liked this bread! That is a huge thumbs up as they can both be quite picky!

Gluten-Free Banana Bread
(recipe courtesy of Book of Yum - this is also a dairy-free recipe)

Ingredients:
2 cups white rice flour or your favorite simple gluten-free flour blend
1 1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/4 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp. ground nutmeg
2 eggs, beaten
1 1/2 cups mashed, ripe bananas (about 5)
1 cup vanilla infused sugar (leave vanilla bean in sugar overnight and then remove bean)
1/2 cup canola oil

Directions:
Preheat oven to 350F. Spray medium bread pan with nonstick cooking spray. Combine dry ingredients in a large bowl and then make a well in the center. Add eggs, banana, sugar, and oil to the center and combine them before folding into the rest of the dry ingredients. Pour or spoon batter into your bread pan. Bake for an hour or until a toothpick comes out clean. Cool for a few minutes before removing from pan, and then cool on a wire rack until you can’t stand it any longer (Ideally until bread is entirely cool, but hey, you're only human.) Slice and enjoy!

I honestly couldn't tell a difference in taste between regular all-purpose flour I have used in the past, and the gluten-free flour I used to make this. I'm happy with the way this turned out and will definitely be making it again in the future.

If you try this or have any other variations, please feel free to share in the comments section below.