Originally posted in Middle-Pause on Medium on June 1, 2025
I have only a few weaknesses when it comes to food, but one reigns supreme: chocolate. I don’t have to have it all the time, at least not daily, but if I buy chocolate, I will eat it rather quickly.
If it’s not dark chocolate, I may eat the whole 100-gram tablet in one day. If it’s dark chocolate, then I’ll eat one, two, three, maybe four squares a day. Dark chocolate may be considered healthy, but four squares a day is still a lot.
Why?
Because I can bake a whole chocolate cake with that amount of cocoa. And it comes out so delicious that I don’t crave chocolate while eating it. And did I mention it lasts a long time? Meaning it lasts long in the fridge, yes, but it’s also a lot of cake to eat.
I bake it in a medium round pan and it probably makes for twelve servings when I portion it. Which lasts me and my family a whole week.
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A nutrient-dense chocolate cake!
There are plenty of chocolate cakes out there, and many of them are worse than chocolate when it comes to their fattening, clogging the arteries potential. My vegan chocolate cake is made with olive oil and relies on bananas and dried fruits to give it extra sweetness, fiber, and a whole range of nutrients.
When I say dried fruit I mean things like prunes, dried figs, and dates, along with walnuts.
I also fiddle with the flour. I use a mix of flours: pastry blend, chickpea flour, and buckwheat. For some reason, buckwheat flour constipates me, so when I make a cake I use two tablespoons tops. I like to use it, though, for the sake of variety. I have come to love these alternate, non-cereal flours ever since I developed a non-celiac gluten sensitivity.
I’ve had to eat gluten-free for eight years now. Do I miss foods with gluten? Yes, I do, and I went off my regimen on several occasions, hoping against hope that my gluten sensitivity had gone away. It hadn’t.
Oh, the world of gluten!
Most of all I miss eating pizza. I wasn’t all that big on pizza before, not like other people who have it almost daily, but I did enjoy delivery pizza. Also donuts, even though I only had them rarely. I also enjoyed pumpkin pie from various hole-in-a-wall pastry shops we have here in Bucharest. Finally, for a while I also missed regular pancakes and crepes, though I have to say that after several failed attempts, I found a way to make delicious gluten-free pancakes.
So yes, I miss foods with gluten. But there’s a big “but” here: I’m not sorry I left gluten in the past. This gluten sensitivity was, in retrospect, one of the best things that happened to me. I’m healthier because of it.
I was lucky I learned to manage my gluten sensitivity without gluten-free breads. Those are not all that healthy, because much of their flour mix is, in effect, starches. And starch breaks down into sugar in the body, which is not that great.
Instead of bread, I usually eat oatcakes. Of course, every now and then I buy GF bread and I indulge in cheese spreads, but, for the most part, in lieu of sandwiches I’ve made do with oatcakes. I enjoy them with things like eggplant spread or hummus and, in spring, with something like hummus or avocado spread and spring onions and radishes.
Thirty plants or more!
For a few years now, ever since some results of the American Gut Project were published in 2018, gastroenterologists and other doctors started recommending we eat upward of 30 plants (vegetables and fruits plus grains, nuts, seeds, herbs, beans, and legumes) a week. This makes for a better microbiome, which leads to better health.
If you eat easy-to-make meals on rotation, you may easily fall short of 30 plants a week. But if you improvise meals and recipes, and if you aim to eat gluten-free and bread-free, you may discover that it’s rather easy to have a balanced, diverse intake of plants.
Here are, for instance, the plants that my vegan dried fruits cake usually contains:
GF flour blend that includes rice flour
Buckwheat flour
Chickpea flour
Cocoa
Carob powder
Bananas
Walnuts
Prunes
Dried figs
Dates
Chia seeds as a substitute for eggs
Olive oil
Natural vanilla or orange extract
That’s 13 plants plus cornstarch (in the GF flour blend), sugar, and baking powder.
Including many plants comes naturally after a while, especially if you like to have a variety of staples readily available in your kitchen. And you don’t have to go overboard.
There is such a thing as recipes that try too hard to be healthy. So yes, I could have also included flaxseed, hemp seeds, cinnamon, nutmeg, cranberries, etc., but this recipe is fine as it is. I want it to taste like a simple, few-ingredients recipe and yet have enough flavors and textures to impress the palate.
I also make a version of this dried fruits chocolate cake with actual chocolate plus butter and eggs, but to be honest, I don’t find it superior to my vegan recipe, just different.
It’s enough to think how much olive oil my vegan chocolate-banana-dried-fruits cake has (10 tbsp) to cave in and ditch the butter. And you’d think all this olive oil in the vegan cake would give it a peculiar taste, but the carob powder is strong enough to offset it.
Have a little fun in the kitchen!
I encourage you to try to find ways to manage your food cravings this way, creating recipes in the kitchen. It’s a lot of fun and rewarding in so many ways, just like any other creative activity. Also, this one involves all your five senses in powerful ways, which makes it a wonderful wellness-boosting activity.
And this vegan chocolate cake is so easy to make.
Vegan Chocolate-Banana-Dried-Fruits Cake (after rounds of improvising)
4 heaping tbsp GF flour blend
1 heaping tbsp buckwheat flour
2 heaping tbsp chickpea flour
2 flat tbsp carob powder and 1 flat tbsp cocoa
2 bananas, first mashed on a plate
75 grams of walnuts, chopped
75 grams of pitted prunes, chopped
75 grams of dried figs, chopped
50 grams of dates, chopped
5 tbsp sugar
2 tsp chia seeds left to soak in about 75 ml of water for 5 mins
10 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp orange or vanilla essence
1 packet of baking powder
Add everything to a bowl and mix. There should be enough liquids in it to make it the right consistency, but if it’s not, add some more soy milk. It needs to have a soft dropping consistency, which means it should mix well and plop off from a tablespoon easily.
Bake in the oven at 180°C/350°F for 45 minutes.
It tastes great.
Enjoy!
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To a happier, healthier life,
Mira
HappierHealthier.Blog 