How to make Sourdough Discard Banana Cake

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This Healthy Vegan Banana Cake is made using Sourdough Discard. It is sugar free, butter free, and can be long – fermented, too! Super delicious topped with your favourite frosting.

Why you’ll Love this recipe:

• It’s cheap to make: I love me a budget recipe, especially when it is healthy and tastes like a treat! This banana cake uses regular ol’ pantry staples, adding no extra cost to your grocery bill.
• It uses up overripe bananas: the older the better! Brown bananas are sweeter and have a more intense flavour, which makes for a better tasting banana cake.
• It’s healthy: free from sugar and with the option of fermenting the flour, this healthy banana cake is easier to digest and gentler on your blood sugar.
• It uses up sourdough discard, which means that you can make this recipe when you need to feed or wake up your sourdough starter. Sourdough discard also adds the option of fermentation, which is what gives this cake an extra health kick.

Ingredients For Healthy Vegan Banana Cake

• White or oat flour. Use oat flour 1:1 as you would white flour. The oats give a slightly more crumbly texture, but if I’m using them, I do not ferment the cake batter. To make oat flour, I simply blend rolled oats in a high speed blender until powdery.
• Bananas, mashed. The bananas are at their best for this cake when they are ripe. Honestly, the browner the better, because that is when they will inject more sweetness into the cake. Add them at the pre-ferment stage so that their flavour really leaches into the cake.
• Sourdough discard. This cake uses a decent 2/3 cup of the stuff, which makes this recipe really handy for when you need to feed your starter, like when making this Date Sourdough bread. Make the cake batter at the same time you feed your sourdough starter – how handy is that?
• Oil. I recommend using a neutral vegetable oil, such as rice bran. If the flavour is too strong, it could tamper with the final flavour of the cake. You could sub in oil for yoghurt if you are wanting this to be a fat-free cake. It makes a moist cake, however it will get drier more quickly than if you use oil.
• Truvia. I like to use Truvia in all my cake recipes, simply because it makes them nice and sweet, and keeps them free of unrefined sugar. Truvia is a pretty cost-effective sweetener. I can get about 2 cakes out of one 9.8 ounce container.
• Salt – essential in all baking, sweet and savoury. Salt brings vibrancy to the flavours you are trying to achieve. It enhances sweetness and draws out the fruitiness. Do not leave it out!
• Baking Agents – baking powder, soda, and vinegar are used to leaven this cake. This cake needs a fair bit of leavening agents, since it is such a big, dense cake. So do not skimp these, either!
• Cinnamon. Just a little bit of cinnamon brings such a yummy flavour to this banana cake. It does not over power the banana, but rather deepens and enriches it.
• Vanilla essence or almond essence, just to be a bit different! Almond essence is a bit strong, though, so I would stick to lovely vanilla essence if you are intending to serve this cake to children.

Making Healthy Vegan Banana Cake

This cake can be made in one day if you are in a hurry. If not, though, I would definitely recommend starting the batter the night before and letting it ferment overnight while you sleep.

The Night Before:

• Make the pre-ferment: Mix the flour, oil, starter, and water in a bowl.
• Mash the bananas, and add to the pre-ferment mixture.
• Cover, and leave to prove overnight (or a minimum of 7 hours).
• Note: this is a great time to feed your starter, if you are making this cake to do so. Then when you wake up in the morning, you will have two wonderful things: a cake mix that is almost ready to be baked, and an active, bubbly starter, ready to be made into bread!

In the Morning:

• Preheat the oven to 160 degrees Celsius. Line a 22cm loose-bottomed cake tin with baking paper.
• To the pre-ferment mixture, add the remaining ingredients. Pour into the prepared cake tin, and place in the centre rack of the oven.
• Bake for 75 minutes, or until a skewer inserted into the middle comes out clean.

Let’s talk about Healthy Banana Cake Frostings

Banana Cake is quite a versatile cake as it lends itself to both fruity and rich flavours.

The only thing that is essential, in my humble opinion, is to have a frosting that is thick, luscious and creamy. This cake is quite dense, so it needs a thick layer of airy icing to lighten up the layers and make it eat in a more pleasurable way.

No thin, see-through glazes, please!!

It is not unheard-of to serve this cake with a lemon icing, which complements the banana really well. The white against the deep caramel looks really striking. If you are using a lemon frosting, make sure to use cream cheese, or a dairy-free alternative. That creamy tang with the caramelly banana cake is simply divine!

I have served this cake with my favourite 2 ingredient chocolate mousse as frosting. It was simply delicious! I love the chocolate and banana flavour combination, so this frosting is the one I like best to use with this cake. The Chocolate Mousse is thick, and creamy with a deep chocolate flavour. It’s just YUM.

This cake would be equally delicious with my passionfruit coconut frosting, found in this Carrot Cake recipe. It uses coconut, coconut cream, and passionfruit to make a decadent cream cheese-like frosting.

Baking Notes

• This cake has no eggs or dairy, so it is safe for vegans and those with sensitivities to eat. If you aren’t vegan or sensitive to dairy or eggs, don’t shy away! You will still find this cake utterly delicious. It doesn’t taste inferior at all to the other kind.
• It is definitely not necessary to ferment the cake batter for 7 hours. If using oat flour, I skip this step, since oats are a bit less processed than devitalised white flour.
• This batter makes a very large cake with a 22 cm diameter. You can easily slice this cake into halves or thirds horizontally and liberally frost. It will make a spectacular cake that will feed a crowd.
• This recipe does make quite a thick Banana cake batter, and it does rise a bit in the oven. Long and slow is what this cake needs. If the oven is too hot, then the cake will burn before it is fully cooked through.
• Do keep an eye on it while baking, as every oven is different, so cooking times may vary.