Question: is there such thing as a nice tasting, healthy cake

James Hargreaves answered on 14 Jun 2011:

Hey!
Is there any point in healthy cake?? lol –

It would certainly be nice if this was the case, but i’m afraid not. The ingredients that make cake all react in certain ways to create the cakes structure. Without them you wouldn’t get the “nice tasting” cake that you’d expect.

The main ingredients in a plain sponge cake are: egg, sugar, flour.
Fats such as butter is added to the mixture to make it feel better in your mouth when you eat it, and also to keep it for longer after its been cooked.

Cake should have a nice light texture, and you get this by a process known as “aeration” (This is basically beating as much air into it as possible when mixing your cake batter) The eggs and sugar form a foam which helps more air get into it.

The cakes is made all yummy and moist by a process known as “coagulation”. This happens when the egg whites in the egg react with heat to make them all stiff.

I’ve done some work when i very first became a scientist on making cake a bit healthier, by swapping a few ingredients around.

For instance i used wholemeal flour, low fat alternatives, and lots of flavours to try and mask the taste of the different ingredients. Although the experiments did give me a healthy cake, the cakes tasted yuk!!!

Recently there has been a lot of research into fat alternatives made from starches and plant materials…. maybe this could be something i look at again the in future?

Just comment if there is anything else you want to know or anything you dont understand! 🙂