The Shadows on My Wall Don't Sleep

Sugar-free products have come a long way since the early 1980s when I first tasted them, and these days most of the sugar-free and no sugar added things we can buy are pretty awesome (go get yourself some Russel Stover sugar-free chocolates, the dark chocolate pecan delights are my favorite) but the baked goods are definitely lagging behind. It's not really a taste thing with most of them, it's texture and depth of flavor that's a problem, cookies tend toward crisp rather than chewy and cakes can be fragile. This is because of the things that sugar does other than make things sweet, like keep them moist and add structure.

Now, I will say, there is nothing I would do to improve Pillsbury's Fudge Brownie Mix, if you like a heavy fudge brownie they have you covered. Their Devil's Food cake mix though... it's tasty, and when you haven't had cake in ages due to sugar it's pretty freaking awesome, but it's merely a mediocre chocolate cake. It's light and fragile and not really that chocolate-y. So today I am experimenting.

After doing a bit a research on what to do to a boxed cake mix to make it taste more like "bakery" cake (from what I see, people mean "from scratch") I have decided to do the following:

1. Add an egg. Every site I found on the subject says to add an egg, so I am. The box says use three so I'm using four. The egg should help with the texture and fragility issue. They also say use melted butter rather than oil but I'm sticking with oil this time.

2. Add flavorings. I'm adding one third cup of cocoa powder. Sites suggest adding coffee; brewed, instant, or espresso powder depending on the site. I'm skipping that for now and sticking with the cocoa.

3. Use boiling water rather than whatever temperature you get it from the tap. Boiling water makes the cocoa powder bloom for fuller flavor. I have to say it's always made my favorite from scratch chocolate cake extra awesome so I figure it's a good bet on improving the box.

So the cake is in the oven now and I'm going to hold off on messing with the frosting until it's out and cooled.

Frosting. This is where Pillsbury has failed me. I'm really not fond of the canned Chocolate Fudge Frosting they make. The flavor is weak and chemical. It's bad snack food chocolate frosting is what I am saying, edible but not really enjoyable and cake should be joyful.

Sites were a bit less useful for fixing up frosting, at least if you are avoiding sugar. I can't do the one thing they all say to do, which is to beat in powdered sugar. The reasoning behind doing that seems to be mostly for fixing texture though, and since the flavor also needs help this is my plan:

1. Add cocoa powder. This should take care of the texture part of what the powdered sugar was doing and also help with the weak chemical chocolate thing.

1a. If it needs more sweetening to deal with the cocoa I will add a bit of liquid stevia. I have vanilla and English toffee flavors as well as plain which goes well with the next step.

2. Add flavoring. A bit of vanilla couldn't hurt.

Another suggestion I saw was to add peanut butter, which is something I will save for another day.

I may have to try the vanilla sugar-free frosting Pillsbury also has (they have yellow cake mix too, which is fragile but tasty). I can make that into a peanut butter or cream cheese frosting, or just add flavor for things like lemon. The yellow cake mix is bound to be made into a lemon cake here someday.

Another idea I have for frosting experiments involves Smuckers Sugar-Free Caramel Sauce, flaked (unsweetened) coconut, and pecans. German Chocolate Cake is one of my favorites. :)

I will update with the taste results after thorough sampling.


Update: Added 2 Tbsp cocoa powder and 1 tsp vanilla to the frosting. It's better but still has that sharp chemical after taste. If I want chocolate frosting that I actually like I will have to come up with something else. I'm leaning toward making ganache at this point. It won't be sugar-free due to the cream having natural sugars, but it will be at least low sugar.

As for the cake, the egg did help a bit on the fragility. I think next time I will do still more cocoa powder and maybe try the butter instead of oil thing. I like a dark dense

hafoc and I have differing views on what constitutes a ripe banana. He likes them just turned yellow, I like them freckled. Normally this works out well, he gets a big hand of bananas and eats them until they start to freckle and then I finish them off. As a result we don't have too many instances of multiple over ripe bananas.

However he bought a large hand of bananas and then left for ten days. I waited until they started to freckle and then did my best to get through them all myself but eventually you just have to admit that you aren't going to get through them all before they rot. So today, on what I judged was the day before ripe ticked over into over ripe, I made banana bread.

¹/₂ c butter, softened
³/₄ c brown sugar
2 eggs
2 ¹/₃ c mashed ripe bananas
1 tsp vanilla
2 c flour
1 tsp baking soda
¹/₄ tsp salt

Preheat the oven to 350°F, grease a 9x5" loaf pan.

Since I was feeling lazy and didn't want to clear a spot for my big KitchenAid stand mixer I mixed this up by hand with a "wooden spoon" made of plastic. Had I had my mixer out I would have done the standard method, cream the butter and sugar, add the eggs, banana, and vanilla, then add the dry ingredients. Instead I mashed the butter and sugar together with the back of the spoon until I had a well blended paste then beat it a bit before adding the salt and soda by sprinkling it over the butter mixture and then beating it in. Then I added the eggs one at a time, then the vanilla and bananas. When those were well mixed I added the flour one cup at a time and sort of folded and stirred to wet it down before beating it a bit.

Pour the batter into the pan and smack it down on the counter a couple times to get it to settle.

Bake for 60-65 minutes or until a toothpick (or knife or cake tester or whatever) poked in the center comes out clean.

Cool 10 minutes in the pan, turn out onto a rack, cool completely.

Lately it seems I can't read recipes in comments without hitting on the infamous Mug Cake. Now for an emergency chocolate hit it's okay but the texture was always too... meaty, for lack of a better term, for my taste. This is undoubtedly due to the lack of leavening and the fact that there is a whole egg in one large coffee mug worth of cake. So I played around a bit, adding a pinch of salt, a smidge of baking soda, things of that sort, and managed to make it taste a bit better but it still didn't really have a cake texture in my opinion. So I tossed the "must fit in a coffee mug" requirement and came up with this.

Coffee Soup Mug Cake

This may work with a smaller mug, but to be safe get yourself a 20 oz mug of some sort. Spray the inside of the mug with your preferred cooking spray.

Mix up in the mug:

¹/₄ cup flour
¹/₃ cup sugar
3 Tbsp cocoa powder
¹/₄ tsp salt
¹/₈ tsp baking soda

Blend these dry ingredients before adding the following wet ones, it will make things easier.

1 egg
3 Tbsp vegetable oil
¹/₄ cup milk
¹/₂ tsp vanilla

Mix well.

Microwave on high for 3-3¹/₂ minutes. The cake will rise above the level of the mug!

Be sure to center the mug in your microwave so the cake will cook evenly and to minimize the chance of a spill over (I've only had it dribble over once, and the mug was not centered in the oven so there was a bit of a tilt, and the small dribble didn't make it all the way down the side of the mug so it was easy to clean up).

You may need a friend to help you eat it, or be greedy and save half for later. ;)

We dug out the 6qt ice cream maker I bought back in '99 for $13 and never used. We made plain vanilla ice cream for the first attempt (best vanilla EVER by the way) and now that we've managed to get through 6 quarts of that I'm making the Spiced Cider Sorbet from the machine recipe booklet, with a few modifications.

This is for a 6 quart machine, if you want amounts for 2, 4, or 5 quarts let me know and I'll add those.

6 c apple cider or juice (one can of concentrate and water to make 6 cups)
3 c sugar
1 tsp ground cloves (originally, 1¹/₂ tsp whole cloves)
1 Tbsp ground cinnamon (originally 6 sticks)
6 c unsweetened applesauce (one 50 oz jar)
3 c cranberry juice (half of a can of concentrate and water to make 3 cups)
¹/₃ c lemon juice

Dissolve sugar in apple juice/cider, add spices and boil for 5 minutes. Remove whole spices. Add remaining ingredients and chill for at least one hour.

Freeze according to your machine's instructions.

Note, have containers that can hold about one gallon plus two cups handy for chilling the mix unless you are fortunate enough to have a fridge that can handle either the pot you mixed it in or your ice cream maker's canister. (I used a gallon jug and the empty applesauce jar.)

Mine is still freezing so I can't tell you if it's any good yet, but it sure smells nice.

Edit: It is done, and it is good.

For the folks on IJ, GJ, and JF: Would you like to see the recipes I have posted on LJ in the past posted over here?

Just another case of sticking a recipe here so I can find it easily again. :)

Makes one 13x9x2 or two 9" round cakes (and I'm currently testing it in a bundt pan.)

2 c sugar
1³/₄ c flour
³/₄ c cocoa
1¹/₂ tsp baking powder
1¹/₄ tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
2 eggs
¹/₂ c vegetable oil
1 cup milk
2 tsp vanilla
1 c boiling water

Mix the dry ingredients together throughly. Add eggs, oil, milk, and vanilla and beat until well combined. At this point it should be somewhere between a regular cake batter and a brownie batter is consistency. Stir in boiling water and immediately pour into prepared pan(s).

Bake at 350°F for 35 minutes or until a toothpick/skewer/cake tester inserted in the center comes out clean.

[ETA: Well the silicon bundt pan experiment was... interesting. The cake will bake up okay in a bundt but it takes about 50 minutes. It needs to cool significantly to unmold though since it's very delicate when hot or even just warm. If I try it again in this pan I will let it get stone cold before I try unmolding it. When you can turn the pan inside out sticking it's that much of a problem.]