Healthy Cranberry Orange Banana Bread

Learn how to make this healthy cranberry orange banana bread from scratch! It’s supremely moist, naturally sweetened, and full of lovely fruit flavors. So simple to make too — no mixer required! It’s perfect for the fall, especially right after Thanksgiving (it uses up lots of those leftover ingredients!), and it’s 114 calories!

 

 
For almost as long as I can remember, my family has made my great-grandmother’s special cranberry salad recipe for Thanksgiving. As part of the tradition, we gathered in the kitchen the night before, and each person helped with one step of the process: chopping fresh cranberries, dicing pecans, peeling an orange, pouring in sugar, whipping up raspberry Jell-O, and preparing the decorative mold.

Yet the next day, no matter how hard we tried, the cranberry salad rarely slid out of that metal mold in one piece. We coated it with cooking spray ahead of time, ran it under hot water, used different amounts of gelatin… But by the time I graduated from college, you could count the number of perfectly molded Thanksgiving cranberry salads on one hand.

At least it always tasted good!
 

 
Eventually, for some reason many of us can’t recall, we decided to skip the Jell-O and metal mold, and we just tossed the rest of the ingredients together in a bowl on Wednesday evening. At our feast, we transferred our new version (more of a relish than a “traditional” cranberry sauce or salad!) into a nice serving dish, and…

Everyone loved it! The fresh cranberry flavor truly shone, the slightly crisp texture paired perfectly with the moist turkey, and it was so much easier to make.

We’ve made that updated version almost every year since!

However…
 

 
Out of habit, we still usually end up buying enough ingredients to make my great-grandmother’s original recipe… Which could easily serve a small army.

As a result, we often end up with lots of extra cranberries and oranges sitting in the fridge many days later, long after the Thanksgiving feast leftovers disappear. So this year, I thought ahead…
 

 
And I’m planning on baking this Healthy Cranberry Orange Banana Bread with the leftover fruit! It’s simple to make, and it’s the perfect use for the overly ripe bananas often sitting on my counter too.

This healthy breakfast quick bread is supremely moist, and it’s bursting with so much fruit flavor! Naturally sweet banana, bright sunshiny orange, and a lovely zing from the tangy cranberries. Bonus: each slice is 114 calories!
 

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