I had a strawberry yogurt incident the other day.  When I thought my strawberry-obsessed daughter would like strawberry yogurt, I was very, very wrong.  This left me with a half dozen containers of strawberry yogurt to use up.  Having finished the holidays, I am “over” all the flavors of pumpkin, gingerbread, and even apple.  I made a pretty yummy healthy cornbread for Christmas that used plain yogurt, so I decided to modify the recipe a bit to make a strawberry banana cake.  Gluten-free, and healthy too, so it is definitely a win-win.  The banana flavor comes in when you use mashed banana to substitute some of the eggs in the recipe.  The result was a pretty (and yummy smelling) cake.  Now, a warning, this does not come out light and fluffy like a pretty yellow butter cake.  This cake is moist and smells wonderful, but it does not have a sugary/buttery taste to it.  It works well for mornings and afternoon snacks, if you are looking for something not too bad for you.

The yogurt I had too much of was strawberry, but you can modify this recipe for any kind of yogurt you have – blueberry, vanilla, strawberry-banana, lemon, etc.  If you use plain yogurt, I would probably add berries, or a hefty pour of vanilla extract to flavor the cake a bit.

I needed 2 cups of strawberry yogurt, and for me that equaled about 4 containers of 6-oz strawberry yogurt.

The yogurt stayed in its own bowl, while I got together the dry ingredients in a second bowl.  For dry ingredients, I combined gluten-free flour, gluten-free whole rolled oats, white sugar, baking soda, and salt.

When it was time for the wet ingredients, I added them straight to the same bowl as the strawberry yogurt.  The first step is to mash the bananas that make this a strawberry-banana cake (and the bananas replaced some of the eggs in the recipe).  I mashed two small bananas, which equaled 1/2 of a cup of mashed banana.  You need about 1/4 cup of mashed banana per egg as a substitute.  I mash mine on a plate to make sure I get all of the chunks of banana worked out.

I added the mashed bananas to the yogurt, as well as 2 eggs and 2 tablespoons of vegetable oil.  That is all the fat you will see in this recipe (depending on the type of yogurt you use of course.)

Once my wet ingredients were stirred together, I poured them into the dry ingredients.  Look how pretty this batter is, with the chunks of strawberries and banana:

Next, I sprayed a 9×13 cake pan with cooking spray and smoothed the batter out.

This baked really quickly for me as I have a very hot oven, and was browned nicely at 15 minutes with a toothpick in the center coming out clean.

Once cooled, you can cut this cake in as small or large portions as you would like.  I cut mine into 15 large squares, but you can make this stretch way more than that if you would like to.  I had some fresh strawberries in the fridge, so I added a few to my plate and it was a great afternoon snack.