When you’re a novice in baking, you will probably rely on recipe books and online tutorials to ensure that the cake you’ll be baking is something to be proud of.
A sumptuous cake that is moist and fluffy to the mouth will surely bring a smile to those who happen to sink their teeth into it. This is possible when you have the right ingredients and use proper baking techniques.
However, what happens when you can’t find the ingredients required in the recipe? What if you’re catering to people trying to avoid certain ingredients such as eggs or sugar?
In this scenario, the right ingredients aren’t necessarily the ones listed in your reference material because there are alternatives that you can use, all of which can still merit the perfect cake.
1. Substituting sugar with honey
For those conscious of their health, avoiding sugar is probably the norm. If you want to make your cake healthier, you might want to skip on the sugar and use alternative sweeteners packed with more nutrients, specifically honey.
Natural honey is known to have a lot of vitamins and minerals. On top of that, it also comes with an anti-inflammatory effect on the body. Practicality wise, honey is easier to mix into the batter than sugar because it’s already liquid – you no longer have to mix and fold to dissolve them.
2. Substituting eggs with ground flaxseeds
If you want to make your egg as free of any animal byproducts as possible, you can use ground flaxseeds instead.
Aside from being a vegan-friendly food item, ground flaxseeds also have a lot of ingredients – so much that they can turn your regular cake into a healthy indulgence because flaxseeds are known to not only lower cholesterol levels, but also promote healthy digestion and lower your risk of diabetes.
3. Substituting regular flour with coconut flour
Regular flour is made from wheat, which has a lot of gluten. While there are a lot of gluten-free alternatives to cakes, that doesn’t mean cakes can’t be gluten-free. To bake one, use coconut flour to make your batter.
Coconut flour doesn’t have gluten because it’s made from dried coconut meat, which is grounded to resemble regular wheat-based flour. Furthermore, using coconut flour will pack your cake with a lot of fibre, which means lower carbohydrates.
4. Substituting oil with sour cream
Oil is a reasonably versatile ingredient because you can use it in a lot of ways – it can be used to fry some of your guilty pleasures, make your soup more aromatic or savoury, and make your cake richer and more tender.
However, just because they make your cake perfect doesn’t mean they’re the healthiest ingredient option out there. To make your cake healthier without compromising the taste, you can try using greek yoghurt instead because it’s not only low in fat, but also high in protein.
5. Substituting whole milk with skim milk
Some people may have mentioned that if you want to shed off a few kilos, you should avoid eating cake because it has a lot of fat.
However, this isn’t necessarily true, especially if you use skim milk instead of whole milk in the ingredients. Skim milk is far less fatty than whole milk, and can be used in baking the perfect cake because it doesn’t affect the look, feel, and taste of the resulting cake.
Conclusion
Baking the perfect cake doesn’t mean you have to follow everything your recipe book tells you, which is why baking is considered an art – you have a lot of creative liberties where you can incorporate your unique twists to make your cake truly your own.
Nevertheless, if you’re pressed for time and need to find a healthy cake in the least amount of time, have a go at our offerings at Polar Puffs & Cakes. As an online cake shop in Singapore, we offer a variety of sweet confectionery perfections, all of which are guaranteed to be halal-certified.
