I have just designed the flyer for the Really Terrible Orchestra concert at this year's Edinburgh Fringe Festival!
Wednesday 13 July 2011
Monday 28 March 2011
A sugar-free birthday party?
Yes! I did achieve a sugar-free birthday party for a 2 year old fascinated about cake. Ok, so that means there were a good range of sweet things involved, like dates, honey and my first try at baking with agave syrup, but there was no refined white sugar.
A very old and very unique friend of mine dear to my heart called me outright "cruel" for attempting to do this and she wasn't joking. Initially I was hurt by this and questioned whether I was denying all sorts of fun things to my child with a puritanical manner and then adding to it with hypocrisy by scoffing sweet things when he's asleep. But hell, I'm not perfect but I was confident that nobody would leave the party feeling let-down, especially not the birthday boy and I tend to feel it turned out fine and that the utter worship of the refined sugar god has been successfully challenged.
Oh, I trawled the internet on and off for about a month before the day itself, looking for good recipes but I could not find anything that suited my taste. I did not want to use a Candrel type sweetener and I steered away from the completely vegan things you find as I'm quite pro-butter in baking and not as puritanical as all that. So in the end I found that there was very little choice and adapted ideas I had got but completely used my own twist for each one.
When you search for sugar-free online plenty of things come up which are gluten-free or everything nice'n'tasty free, and although this was not what I was looking for I'm also not a fan of refined white flour and its many many subsiduary products.
So here was my rule of thumb:
- aim to replace a lot of the flour with ground nuts of several varieties (whilst avoiding peanut for asthma connections!)
- don't be shy of butter or cream
- replace white or brown sugar, (whether fairtrade or not!) with dates/ honey/ agave syrup/ fructose enhanced jam (oh and in one case a bit of very very very dark chocolate).
Of the above, the ones I am the most skeptical about are the agave and the jam as they seem to me to be quite processed and the jam surely must end up just as sugary. But even so, I really do feel that the taste in your mouth after you eat any of the above is not as furry and bad as after a mouthful of straight down the line Tate n Lyle. Is this merely psychological? perhaps, but even so, nobody complained about the food being dull...
Here's what I made:
- Pistachio cupcakes with honey and orange
- Date and walnut muffins with banana
- Carrot cake with walnut and date
- A three-layer cake with almond sponge and dark chocolate swirl and raspberry cream filling
In my opinion the first and the last were the best, but I have ideas about improving the middle two which I will add here!
Rebecca's Pistachio cupcakes
100g pistachio whizzed up fine
70g ground almonds
160g butter
160g honey
3 eggs
seeds of 1 cardamon, ground fine
60g rice flour
zest of 2 oranges and juice of 1
Put all the dry stuff together and whizz in the wet stuff. I used silicone cup cake cases as I think it would be a nightmare to scrape out of metal cases or even to peel off paper ones. This is a wet mixture! I baked it at about 185 degrees and checked it after 15 mins, may need more but carefully touch the top and judge if it's too squidgy or not.
Rebecca's Date and Walnut muffins
5 oz butter
5 oz self-raising wholemeal flour
4 oz walnuts ground up as fine or chunky as you like
6 oz dates
2 over-the-top bananas
juice of 1 orange
2 eggs
4 fl oz milk
The dry stuff/ wet stuff rule applies here too. My twist was to simmer the dates in the orange juice until they have become a mushy pulp. I find that you get dates a lot in recipes used in chunks, but they are basically one of the world's first and most delicious forms of sweetness and if they disperse around the whole mixture extra sugar is totally unnecessary. Now these muffins came out flat and dense, a bit of a disappointment to me. I think this is because of about 3 reasons and maybe it can be solved! I twisted one of the recipes by almost halving the self-raising flour and replacing with walnut, and I should have added baking powder to make up for that - try at least 1 spoon. The bananas weigh it all down and might as well be removed or left in chunks rather than whizzed as it was not very banana-ish anyway. Lastly the dates have their own puply, papery mass which is a separate thing to their luscious sugar. When you make Haleg for Passover, a middle eastern sweet, you boil the dates in water until a certain temperature then sieve them overnight through a muslin to separate the juice from the pulp which is discarded. Time-consuming but utterly delicious and not gritty. You can shortcut this perhaps from getting a similar date syrup which is available from some middle eastern shops, I think it originates from Syria.
Rebecca's Carrot cake with Walnut and Date
200g brown self-raising flour
150g walnut ground fine or chunky
120g rice flour
half a teaspooon baking powder
300g dates
200g butter
100g oil
zest and juice 1 orange
4 eggs
270g grated carrot
All the other recipes were adapted from reading loads on the internet but were mainly me. I have to admit that this one adapts one recipe only, partly because my strength was waning, but when you hit an Ottolenghi recipe you can't be too far wrong. His contained four times the amount of oil (but no butter) and nearly double the sugar! Also I personally don't need any of the cinnamon, clove and nutmeg that normally goes into a carrot cake so a took it out. The icing was a disaster so let's forget about it. But this cake was great but the only slight fault was the pithy dates again (it's only me who picks up on this not anybody else). Lastly I cooked it for an hour which was about right but although the top was showing signs of being overdone the middle was barely just cooked. Old Yotam's tip if this is happening is to wrap the cake in foil, in the oven, and leave it in for longer. Sounds like a good plan.
Rebecca's layered marble cake with Almond, Chocolate and Raspberry cream filling
8oz butter
6oz agave syrup
4 eggs
4 oz white self-raising flour
4 oz ground almonds
half a teaspoon baking powder
4 oz melted dark chocolate, Lindt 90%
for the filling:
double cream, whipped up
raspberry and pomegranate sugar-free jam (think it's sweetened with concentrated apple juice)
Basically this is a very much adapted Victoria Sponge. Mix it all up in the usual way, dry then wet. Take half the mixture and mix in the melted chocolate. Then get 3 small tins and in each put 3 blobs of the almond mix and put 3 blobs of the chocolate mix in-between, then gently swirl them together. When cooked and cooled, stir some jam into the whipped cream and sandwich them all together. That Lindt chocolate had the least sugar content I could think of but maybe if I try it next time I would find ground cocoa nibs and use them instead, the real deal.
Mmmm, beautiful, yummy, not too virtuous and all eaten up!
A very old and very unique friend of mine dear to my heart called me outright "cruel" for attempting to do this and she wasn't joking. Initially I was hurt by this and questioned whether I was denying all sorts of fun things to my child with a puritanical manner and then adding to it with hypocrisy by scoffing sweet things when he's asleep. But hell, I'm not perfect but I was confident that nobody would leave the party feeling let-down, especially not the birthday boy and I tend to feel it turned out fine and that the utter worship of the refined sugar god has been successfully challenged.
Oh, I trawled the internet on and off for about a month before the day itself, looking for good recipes but I could not find anything that suited my taste. I did not want to use a Candrel type sweetener and I steered away from the completely vegan things you find as I'm quite pro-butter in baking and not as puritanical as all that. So in the end I found that there was very little choice and adapted ideas I had got but completely used my own twist for each one.
When you search for sugar-free online plenty of things come up which are gluten-free or everything nice'n'tasty free, and although this was not what I was looking for I'm also not a fan of refined white flour and its many many subsiduary products.
So here was my rule of thumb:
- aim to replace a lot of the flour with ground nuts of several varieties (whilst avoiding peanut for asthma connections!)
- don't be shy of butter or cream
- replace white or brown sugar, (whether fairtrade or not!) with dates/ honey/ agave syrup/ fructose enhanced jam (oh and in one case a bit of very very very dark chocolate).
Of the above, the ones I am the most skeptical about are the agave and the jam as they seem to me to be quite processed and the jam surely must end up just as sugary. But even so, I really do feel that the taste in your mouth after you eat any of the above is not as furry and bad as after a mouthful of straight down the line Tate n Lyle. Is this merely psychological? perhaps, but even so, nobody complained about the food being dull...
Here's what I made:
- Pistachio cupcakes with honey and orange
- Date and walnut muffins with banana
- Carrot cake with walnut and date
- A three-layer cake with almond sponge and dark chocolate swirl and raspberry cream filling
In my opinion the first and the last were the best, but I have ideas about improving the middle two which I will add here!
Rebecca's Pistachio cupcakes
100g pistachio whizzed up fine
70g ground almonds
160g butter
160g honey
3 eggs
seeds of 1 cardamon, ground fine
60g rice flour
zest of 2 oranges and juice of 1
Put all the dry stuff together and whizz in the wet stuff. I used silicone cup cake cases as I think it would be a nightmare to scrape out of metal cases or even to peel off paper ones. This is a wet mixture! I baked it at about 185 degrees and checked it after 15 mins, may need more but carefully touch the top and judge if it's too squidgy or not.
Rebecca's Date and Walnut muffins
5 oz butter
5 oz self-raising wholemeal flour
4 oz walnuts ground up as fine or chunky as you like
6 oz dates
2 over-the-top bananas
juice of 1 orange
2 eggs
4 fl oz milk
The dry stuff/ wet stuff rule applies here too. My twist was to simmer the dates in the orange juice until they have become a mushy pulp. I find that you get dates a lot in recipes used in chunks, but they are basically one of the world's first and most delicious forms of sweetness and if they disperse around the whole mixture extra sugar is totally unnecessary. Now these muffins came out flat and dense, a bit of a disappointment to me. I think this is because of about 3 reasons and maybe it can be solved! I twisted one of the recipes by almost halving the self-raising flour and replacing with walnut, and I should have added baking powder to make up for that - try at least 1 spoon. The bananas weigh it all down and might as well be removed or left in chunks rather than whizzed as it was not very banana-ish anyway. Lastly the dates have their own puply, papery mass which is a separate thing to their luscious sugar. When you make Haleg for Passover, a middle eastern sweet, you boil the dates in water until a certain temperature then sieve them overnight through a muslin to separate the juice from the pulp which is discarded. Time-consuming but utterly delicious and not gritty. You can shortcut this perhaps from getting a similar date syrup which is available from some middle eastern shops, I think it originates from Syria.
Rebecca's Carrot cake with Walnut and Date
200g brown self-raising flour
150g walnut ground fine or chunky
120g rice flour
half a teaspooon baking powder
300g dates
200g butter
100g oil
zest and juice 1 orange
4 eggs
270g grated carrot
All the other recipes were adapted from reading loads on the internet but were mainly me. I have to admit that this one adapts one recipe only, partly because my strength was waning, but when you hit an Ottolenghi recipe you can't be too far wrong. His contained four times the amount of oil (but no butter) and nearly double the sugar! Also I personally don't need any of the cinnamon, clove and nutmeg that normally goes into a carrot cake so a took it out. The icing was a disaster so let's forget about it. But this cake was great but the only slight fault was the pithy dates again (it's only me who picks up on this not anybody else). Lastly I cooked it for an hour which was about right but although the top was showing signs of being overdone the middle was barely just cooked. Old Yotam's tip if this is happening is to wrap the cake in foil, in the oven, and leave it in for longer. Sounds like a good plan.
Rebecca's layered marble cake with Almond, Chocolate and Raspberry cream filling
8oz butter
6oz agave syrup
4 eggs
4 oz white self-raising flour
4 oz ground almonds
half a teaspoon baking powder
4 oz melted dark chocolate, Lindt 90%
for the filling:
double cream, whipped up
raspberry and pomegranate sugar-free jam (think it's sweetened with concentrated apple juice)
Basically this is a very much adapted Victoria Sponge. Mix it all up in the usual way, dry then wet. Take half the mixture and mix in the melted chocolate. Then get 3 small tins and in each put 3 blobs of the almond mix and put 3 blobs of the chocolate mix in-between, then gently swirl them together. When cooked and cooled, stir some jam into the whipped cream and sandwich them all together. That Lindt chocolate had the least sugar content I could think of but maybe if I try it next time I would find ground cocoa nibs and use them instead, the real deal.
Mmmm, beautiful, yummy, not too virtuous and all eaten up!
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