Here's a vegan baking standard. Bananas act as a egg and fat replacer, making for a nice, healthy dessert. Make your own apple sauce and add it to the Banana Bread for an extra flavorful punch!

• 2 Cups Sifted Flour
• 1 teaspoon Baking Soda
• 1/4- 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 Cup Margarine (I use a sunflower additive free variety)
• 1 Cup sugar
• 1/2 Cup applesauce (see attached recipe)
• 1 tsp. vanilla
• 3-4 mashed bananas
• 1 Cup chopped nuts (walnuts are particularly nice)

How to put it together:

Grease pan (something like 15x25cm). Sift flour, Baking Soda, Salt together into a big bowl. Blend the wet ingredients in a food processor separately. Add the wet ingredients to the dry mix, stir until properly mixed and put in a greased bread pan.

Tips / recipe amendments:

• 1/2 cup of wholemeal flour and 1 1/2 cups of white self-raising cake flour.
• Put some chopped nuts on top
• Definitely add spices if you don't use your own spicey apple sauce. Add a pinch of ground cloves, nutmeg and a good amount of cinnamon to make it more spicey/more interesting flavour.
• When you have bananas, you can freeze freeze them and then use them for recipes like this. Then when you want to use the frozen bananas, put them in your oven while it pre-heats, until they're mushy/feel squishy inside. Cut one end of with scissors and the banana pulp just comes right out like thick juice! Easier than having to let them defrost for a couple hours and this utilises the heat coming from the oven during pre-heating.

• Apples (to make it worthwhile, at least 15-20, as many as you can get your hands on), peeled, cored
• 2+ TBS sugar
• 1 TBS vegetable oil
• Peel from 1/2 a lemon
• Juice from 1/2 a lemon
• Whole cinnamon sticks
• Whole Cloves
• ground clove
• ground cinnamon
• ground nutmeg
• pinch of salt
• pinch of black pepper or chilli pepper
• Water to prevent burning
  

How to make the hot and spicey goodness:

Peel, core apples. Chop into bits (depending on how chunky you want it to be). In a heavy sauce pan, add 1 cup of water, the lemon peel, the cinnamon sticks, cloves and oil. Let it heat up. Then add in chopped apples. Let it simmer for 10 minutes to get nice and hot. Add sugar, lemon juice and spices. Stir regularly. Let it cook until you like the consistency/texture and flavour. The more you cook it the thicker the consistency and the denser the flavour.

Tips / amendments:

• You can forget the oil and sugar if you want it to be that little bit healthier!
• Apple sauce can be used as a margarine replacement - use in equal proportion to what the recipe calls for in margarine, plus a little bit of oil (1 tbs - any veg oil will do).
• Apple sauce in baking cuts fat as a margarine replacement and also gives a good texture, acting like an egg-replacer sometimes.