The lovely Sam, has issued a decree, this Sugar High Friday has become Sugar LOW Friday, on sale, going cheap, this month only! Now that is a sale I can go along with! I knew that whatever recipe I used I wasn’t going to be going down the artifical sweetner route. That stuff is just plain nasty. The flavour is gross, and there are the health implications. I am not sure that we have enough information on these products and that the research that has been conducted in a “unbiased” environment, or that there is any real longterm studies out there. But, there is alot of information out there and I leave it up to you to make up your own mind. I do however know this, I would much rather less higher quality food than more junk. Why would I want to waste the food I do get to eat on crap? Obviously I wouldn’t, and I am probably preaching to the converted by talking to floggers. If I am substituting sugars, I use natural products like concentrated apple syrup and brown rice syrup but mainly I prefer to just leave it out. I drink tea and coffee sugar less, I drink soda water plain, a dash of lemon or a drop of fruit juice. See my lovely refreshing drink recipe for ideas. I feel better for this change, and anytime I slightly binge on sugar I remember how much I really don’t like it, how it doesn’t agree with me and how much my taste has slowly evolved over time to appreciate the more natural flavour and sweetness of foods. I now find most foods too sweet. This is a much nicer way to control sugar intake than chlorinated carbon molecules!

When it came to choosing arecipe, instead of struggling, I knew exactly where to turn. To my friend Aine’s Cookbook Recipes to nurture who is just as sweet as pie, a refined sugar less pie that is .
True to my form though, I just couldn’t leave the recipe alone, especially when I had ingrediants already on hand. So I turned and orange and hazelnut bundt into mini blackberry and almond bundts. Cute Huh? As an added bonus the cake is also vegan, sweet. Even more importantly, it is really, really easy.

Blackberry Almond Bundt Cake
2 cups of wholemeal pastry flour
1 cup of almond meal (I recommend toasting the almonds and grinding them your self)
1/2tsp sea salt
2 tsp baking powder
2/3 cup of maple syrup
2/3 cup of corn oil
1 1/2 cups of blackberry jam, preferably sugar free or sweetened with fruit juice
1/2 cup of rice milk or coconut milk

Preheat the oven to 180C and lightly grease a bundy tin. In a large bowl combine thepastry flour, almond meal, sea salt and baking powder. In a seperate bowl mix the maple syrup, corn oil and 1 cup of the jam and the rice milk.Add the liquid to the flourand stir to combine. Pour the batter into the prepared tin and bake on the middle shelf of the oven for 45 mins or until a skewer comes out clean. Allow to cool for 10mins before turning out.
Meanwhile heat the remaing 1/2 cup of jam and 1/2 cup of water in a small saucepan, stir til a reduced syrupforms. Pour over the warm cake. Serve.
Tagged with: SHF # 15 + Low Sugar

This entry was posted on Friday, January 27th, 2006 at 12:00 am and is filed under Recipes, Food Blog Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.