The past few weeks I’ve been playing with some new ingredients. In my quest to bake a decent cake with no butter, sugar or eggs I’ve begun work on removing butter – and had some success on the sugar front.
Replacing the butter, I’ve used coconut oil, which I’ve found works brilliantly as long as I also use it in conjunction with olive oil (50/50). If I don’t use olive oil the first part of the cake process (oil and sugar) doesn’t go white and fluffy. So the olive oil is great for adding volume.
I tried using agave syrup the other week – I used the same amount as sugar but it was far too sweet and made the cake go quite dark so that was no good. I’ve been told to try light Agave next time. In the meantime though I found my favourite honey brand from New Zealand has arrived in the UK, so I bought a jar of Northern Rata to use as my cake sweetener.
This time I used half honey / half sugar, alongside my half coconut / half olive oil mix. Complicated – but so far so good. And good honey isn’t cheap so the sugar stays for now.
My new discovery this week was Einkorn flour – the oldest flour known to mankind. It’s a lovely wholemeal flour and as I like to use a few different flours in my baking I’m happy to add this to the collection. You can substitute it out for spelt or anything else if you can’t find any.
You can also turn this recipe into cupcakes if you like – we did it once and they were lovely. Just decrease the baking time to around 15 minutes and bake until golden brown.
Recipe at Lovely Food.
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