Pater Familias … because I'm your FATHER!

Killer Cake - Half The Sugar, Twice As Good

March 23, 2010 · Food

Care to share your own favorite recipe tweak?

Let Home-Baked Treats Stand Up And Be Tasted

Stay with me, this is not about good nutrition, a concept I believe to be incompatible with home-baked desserts. To claim healthiness with a straight face, I’d have to make my cakes and pies and throw them out before Girl Child saw, then sub in raw fruit. True, we could get all Oregon, with whole grains and honey and carob – ooh, chicks in purple tights and clogs, which I find kinda hot -- but unless you’re an experienced granolahead baker, you get all-natural building materials.

No, the payoff of drastically dialing back sugar, is that the output tastes better. Lots better, at least in the recipes I've tried. Huge that the stuff tastes, period, because standard all-American treats tend to be so godawful full of sugar you can detect nothing but. Don’t even get me going about store-bought and circus gluck put out by chain restaurants – I mean who the hell wants hot fudge on a brownie?

Can’t help it, getting wrought up like this. I am a man who cares about dessert, thinks about it, idealizes it, believes in it deeply and passionately. And egregious over-use of sugar is a disgrace, an affront. It is bakery abuse, nothing short, and you and I can step up and do something about it.

We can leave out half the sugar that recipes call for.

A great place to start doing it is amazingly easy and good Chocolate Oil Cake submitted by one Kristi Demanette to Pater’s go-to cooking site allrecipes.com. (Wanted to cut-and-paste for you, but legalities in tiny type scared me). Print the thing out, follow it to the letter, except adding only one of the two cups of sugar called-for.

Don’t be scared, pilgrim, because it’s cake. Making the batter takes five minutes, without no technical chef tricks. My border collie, if you gave her bark-control kitchen prosthetics, would do fine. And the cake, the cake – dreamy, moist, dark, with chocolate flavor (from cocoa) that just pops, big and beautiful, because sweetness does not get in the way. Cake a grownup can love.

Some mama is saying, “Yes, but kids like super sweet…”

Sure, if don’t have anything but. Last week, we served up half-sugar chocolate oil cake at Girl Child’s seventh birthday party. After she blew out the candles, we had a ten-girl feeding frenzy. Few days before that, Minerva took some to GC’s class for a birthday thing and brought down the house. In both cases some kids declared it lifetime best.  Adults hammered it, too.

Goes to show that stuff for kids doesn’t always have to be kids’ stuff.

And cake doesn’t have to be too damn sweet.

Try leaving out sugar.

 Okay, what do you do to take dessert to the next level?

Check out Pater’s famous half-sugar Primo Pumpkin Pie.

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