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 it is marketed Eno as Ayurvedic fruit salt and healthy, it is not made out 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 puree. 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.
