With healthy cake recipes you can eat healthily and enjoy cakes.
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Eating cakes as part of a healthy diet isn’t a problem. Make your own cakes, and you know exactly what’s in them - that's the joy of our healthy baking recipes.
There’s nothing unhealthy about a cake made with wholewheat flour, organic butter, organic sugar, free-range eggs – as long as you don’t eat the lot at one sitting! The taste and texture of a cake you've made yourself will be far superior to anything you can buy at the supermarket. It's satisfying to do, and it really doesn't take very long. You can also double-up the quantities, and make two cakes, freezing one to use in the future.
Enjoy cakes as part of a healthy diet
Home-made cakes generally contain far less sugar than commercial cakes. Inspect the labels of bought cakes, and you’ll find all sorts of food additives that you’d probably rather not eat, especially the spectacularly unhealthy trans fats and hydrogenated vegetable oils, present in many manufactured cakes.
Home-made cakes are good value for money. Bought cakes are often very meanly sized. A home-made cake usually goes a lot further.
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Be selective about the recipes you use, and go for healthy cake recipes. Save the chocolate fudge cakes, or cakes with thick frostings for special occasions. Try a healthy chocolate cake recipe instead.
Look for recipes that use fruit, nuts or vegetables, as in this healthy carrot cake recipe, or these pumpkin cake recipes. It’s a good way of getting extra fruit and veg into your diet.
Cakes that use dried fruit are also excellent. Try these mini fruit cakes. Quick to make, very moreish and perfect for lunch boxes.
Use good, wholesome ingredients for truly healthy cake recipes. Choose organic when you can for ingredients such as sugar, flour, oats, fruits including candied and dried fruits, milk, eggs, butter.
When you're buying fat for cake-making, beware of soft margarines. Many of them, especially the cheaper ones, are full of hydrogenated vegetable oils. Use them, and you defeat the object of making your own cakes. Look for the olive or sunflower based varieties - but always check the label. You can also use softened butter in most recipes, instead of margarine.
If you're keen to reduce the fat content in your cakes, try replacing butter with a reduced fat product. I've had excellent, very light results using a reduced fat olive oil based spread, which contains 5.9g fat per 10g, as opposed to butter, which has 8.2g fat for every 10g. The olive oil-based product is also much lower in saturated fat than butter, containing only 13g per 100g, against butter's 54g per 100g.
Use wholewheat flour instead of some, or all, of the flour in your recipe.
Some brands of baking powder sold in the US contain aluminum (aluminium). Some people are concerned about a possible link between aluminum and Alzheimer's disease. Whether or not this is a real risk, you may prefer to look for an aluminum-free brand of baking powder such as Rumford.
Replace some of the sugar in recipes with fruit puree. Use apples, prunes or apricots. Stew in a little water until tender, blend, and use to replace an equal volume of sugar in your recipe.
You can also replace some of the fat in the same way. I sometimes replace half the fat and half the sugar in a recipe with pureed apple. It’s very successful, and adds moistness and a subtle fruity flavour as well.
Cake making is very satisfying, and if you choose simple healthy cake recipes, it’s also very quick. I make a large cake once a week, and it takes about 10 mins to get the mixture together, plus baking time. Not long, for something that’s so much better for you than manufactured cake. And perfect for lunch boxes.
Cakes made from healthy cake recipes have a habit of disappearing rather fast. To help them last that bit longer, I usually cut them into squares, or mark them out into slices, depending on the shape. Or I make individual cakes, like Blueberry Muffins.
There’s nothing unhealthy about a cake made with wholewheat flour, organic butter, organic sugar, free-range eggs – as long as you don’t eat the lot at one sitting! The taste and texture of a cake you've made yourself will be far superior to anything you can buy at the supermarket. It's satisfying to do, and it really doesn't take very long. You can also double-up the quantities, and make two cakes, freezing one to use in the future.
