Healthy Banana Cake Recipes

My three year old is obsessed with making cakes. We make and eat a lot of cake. In the summer I started worrying about how much sugar he was eating. I shared this anxiety on my Instagram and got lots of responses!

• He eats proper food and we don’t buy juice or those supermarket snacks. So, I figured a cupcake a day isn't all that bad (?)

• My cousin said her son used to have a chocolate roll for breakfast every day and that I must remember THEY GET TWO SETS OF TEETH so don't worry about it.
  
  
• I started following Tim Spector on insta and his reels freaked me out: chemicals in those snack packets, the fact that oats are the most heavily sprayed crop of the lot. It made me more comitted to REAL food i.e. butter, eggs, flour, sugar. No weird chemically formulated alternative health foods.
  
  
• My mother was strict about both sugar and TV so as soon as we could, we binged watched soap operas and I spent my travel money buying junk food on the way home from school and got really fat as a young teen. I'm sure the restriction of sugar led me to being desperate for junk later on. So maybe being more relaxed about it will turn on a self regulation for my children that I never learned? I have no evidence whatsoever to back this idea up, just a hunch.

I got LOADS of responses on Instagram. By far the most common response was a link to this ‘healthy’ banana bread recipe and the other most common response was: let them eat real cake especially if they are measuring it all out themselves.

Here is the one I use (we didn’t like the oil but I would try it again with a different oil). I swap the flour for wholemeal, half the sugar and add one more banana. My son could probably make you a cake all by himself as well as grow and harvest you a patch of broad beans. Not bad for 3!