In an effort to avoid replicating what happened with Kate's birthday cake, I decided to bake the other birthday cake I owe now. My friend is on a very low calorie diet at the moment - aiming for a mere 1200kcal per day (For contrast, the UK Department of Health Estimated Average Requirements are 1940kcal for women and 2550kcal for men - and a large Big Mac meal from McDonald's (with Coke for the drink) weighs in at a whopping 1160kcal). I've been feeling guilty about completely messing this diet up every time we meet up (there's often alcohol involved followed by eating out somewhere), so for this birthday cake, I thought I'd try to make a sufficiently low-calorie cake that it would merely harm this diet rather than ploughing straight through it with a steamroller. There are shedloads of "low calorie" cake recipes out on the 'net, but if you actually total them up, you find that they are ludicrously calorific and often barely any different to their full-fat equivalents. So I set myself the task of baking a cake that would be 200-250kcal per portion, a portion probably being about 1/8th of the cake. So here we go!
Low Calorie CakeIngredients- 100g Coarsely grated carrot (28kcal)
- 100g Raisins (291kcal)
- 175ml Water (0kcal)
- 100g Honey (304kcal)
- 20g Butter (150kcal)
- 170g Self-raising flour (584kcal)
- 50g Walnuts (345kcal)
- 100g Finely diced apple (52kcal)
- Zest of one orange (~0kcal)
- 13g Splenda®* sugar substitute (52kcal)
- 1tsp Ground cinnamon (6kcal)
- 1/2 tsp Nutmeg (6kcal)
- 1tsp Vanilla extract (12kcal)
- 1 Egg (74kcal)
Energy content for the cake: 1904kcal** per cake, 238kcal per 1/8th cake.
Method- Put the carrot, raisins, water, honey and butter in a saucepan and bring to the boil. Simmer for 10 minutes and allow to cool.
- Measure out all of the remaining ingredients into a bowl and fold in the carrot mixture.
- Let down the mixture with a little water if necessary and pour into a cake tin.
- Bake at 180C/Gas Mark 4 for 1 hour.
- Allow to cool on a wire rack.
Here's the carrot sludge after simmering. I don't think it looks very promising...
...but not as worrying as the finished cake mixture ready for the oven. It looks a bit like pavement pizza to me )o:.
Well, we'll see how it is when it comes out of the oven!
*I hate artificial sweeteners, and you wouldn't catch me baking with them usually. However, I think without them, this challenge would be entirely impossible. I think that Splenda® is probably about the best sweetener readily available - certainly much better than aspartame or sorbitol, both of which have horrible tastes. Sucralose tastes much more like sugar in my opinion. The company says 100g of sugar is roughly equivalent to 12g Splenda, so this is what I used as a conversion.
**A quick note on precision: Yes, this is overly precise. Especially since most of the nutritional information is from various places on the internet found through Google and I have no idea as to the accuracy of any of this. I would imagine that 2 s.f. would be reasonable, taking inaccuracies in measuring out ingredients and inaccuracies in nutritional information into account, so 1900kcal and 240kcal would be more appropriate values. But hey, this is my blog and I'll be careless and lazy if I want to, dammit!
As you can see, the top is rather dark - excessively so, really. What happened was I checked the cake with a skewer, and it came out gunky (that's a technical term, by the way). So I put the cake back in the oven for a bit. I checked it again, and once again, the skewer was gunky. Back it goes. Repeat a few more times, and then the top of the cake was so dark that I didn't dare bake it any longer. So I took it out and delivered it with a warning that it might not be baked all the way through and might need zapping in the microwave. It was only after I tried a slice myself that I realised that it was probably just the cooked apple that was getting on the skewer. Doh!
Back to what really counts: the cake. It was actually rather good for a low-calorie cake. Because of the over-baking, the top was a bit hard and chewy, but not excessively so and I'd say not unpleasantly so either. The texture was reminiscent of Christmas cake, and quite flavourful too. The apple worked really well, as did the walnut, which provided some much-needed texture. Sweetness was about right I think, and the Splenda® worked really well. I think you could reasonably replace all of the honey with Splenda (with a bit of water to compensate for the lost moisture) and even possibly replace some of the raisins with it too if you wanted to eke out a few more calories. For an ultra-low calorie cake, losing the walnuts would be the next logical step, though I think the cake would lose quite a bit through this. Perhaps replacing the walnuts with sunflower seeds instead might be an option, but I'm not sure. But overall, I'd say it was quite a success!
