A classic cake with all pantry ingredients. Skip store-bought pre cake mix. Go with your own organic ingredients or ingredients as stone milled whole grain flour, organic raw sugar or palm sugar. Know what you eat without missing the feel and flavor of cake.

No matter how many recipes you may see for “healthy” cakes, cakes aren’t healthy. However, some cakes are less unhealthy than others, and if you bake your own cakes, you can make substitutions to improve their nutritional profile. Choosing a homemade cake, substituting flour with whole-grain, white with brown or raw sugar for example, allows you to have a slice of cake without consuming the very high amounts of calories, fat, sugar and sodium found in many frosted cakes. Replace baking soda with Eno (fruit salt). Eno is available in Asian grocery stores. Eno is composed of 50% sodium bicarbonate, 15% sodium bitartrate and 35% free tartaric acid. It’s basic purpose is to get relief from acidity. Another way to use is in cooking as it causes the flours to rise and can be handy. Though eno is marketed as Ayurvedic fruit salt and healthy, it is not made of fruit. Real health benefits are unknown. It contains 2.1g of sucrose per 5ml which makes not suitable for diabetics and low sodium diets.

While no cake is really healthy, you can make substitutions when baking to make the end result a little less unhealthy. If you aren’t making a white cake, use at least half whole-wheat flour, preferably whole-wheat pastry flour or white whole-wheat flour, to increase the fiber and micronutrients in the cake. Decrease the sugar by up to one-third, adding cinnamon or vanilla to bring out the sweetness of the cake while limiting the sugar it contains. Replace up to half of the fat in the cake with fruit or vegetable purees, like applesauce, pureed prunes, pureed beans or pumpkin purée. These will lower the amount of fat while increasing the fiber, vitamins and minerals in your cake. Choose a cake that doesn’t require frosting and top it with a sprinkle of chopped nuts, cocoa powder, powdered sugar or coconut for decoration.

4 ingredient cake

 

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Prep time

10 mins

Cook time

50 mins

Total time

1 hour

 

Basic 4 ingredients are flour, eggs, sugar and butter. Depending on type of flour, sugar you use, ingredients quantity may vary slightly.

Author: Ujwala Chintala

Recipe type: Dessert

Serves: 6

Ingredients

• ½ cup - whole wheat flour
• ½ cup - unbleached all purpose flour
• 1 cup - brown sugar or palm sugar or preferably raw cane sugar. Raw cane sugar and palm sugar has a very low melt temperature and an extremely high burn temperature so they make perfect healthy choices in baked products in place of white sugar.
• 1 cup - eggs
• 1 stick or ½ cup - butter
• ⅛th tsp - vanilla or cinnamon which ever flavor you like.
• 1 tsp - baking powder or ½ tsp baking soda or ½ tsp baking powder and ½ tsp eno.

Instructions

1. Keep butter outside for at-least 30 minutes till it is at room temperature and soft.
2. Save little butter to rub on pan.
3. In a mixing bowl, add flour, sugar, eggs and butter.
4. Whisk till well mixed. Using electric mixer save lot of time.
5. Add vanilla and baking powder. Whisk well. Make sure you add baking powder or soda just before baking. Baking powder looses raising power if it settles down in flour for a while.
6. Rub soft butter to a round baking pan. Sprinkle flour on butter and bump with hand on all sides till flour spreads all over butter.
7. Pour batter in pan. Bake at 350ºf (150ºc) for 40-50 minutes.
8. Insert a fork or toothpick to see if it is cooked thru. If you see raw batter on fork, continue to bake.
9. If you don't have an oven, pour 2 inches of sand in a pressure cooker. Place baking dish on sand. Cook on medium heat. Depending on the amount of batter and sand, it might take 2 hours to bake. Insert toothpick to see if it is cooked all the way thru.
10. This cake is sweet and moist by itself. Whipped cream is not needed.

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