Talk

So I tried out the infamous blackbean and chocolate cake. Very easy to make. It is nice and chocolatey but it tastes like something is missing (i.e. fat!). It isn't too sweet and you can't taste the black beans so maybe a contender for healthy cake option....

There is a chocolate beetroot cake recipe on the Abel and Cole website but I think there is a (un)healthy dose of butter in it...

Chocolate pumpkin loaf sounds good. Has anyone mentioned Chocolate and Beetroot cake? Also very tasty and looks beautiful with the deep red colour!

I have made chocolate pumpkin loaf a few times. You can easily sub the pumpkin for butternut squash. It's pretty low fat. You can even swap out the oil for extra apple sauce to be super healthy but pfft, sod that! It's vegan so good for those with dairy allergies.

But most importantly, it's bloody yummy!

Mmm - sounds good, thank you - maybe my next foray into vegetable-enhanced cake baking.

Butternut squash (or any squash, I think) cake, typed in wholesale from Abel and Cole:

200g plain white flour
200g caster sugar
1tsp bicarb of soda
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp sea salt
1 tsp freshly grated or ground ginger
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 vanilla pod, seeds scrapped (optional)
100ml milk
100ml boiling water
50ml sunflower or olive oil
1 egg, whisked
200g pumpkin or squash, grated

Heat oven to 180C/Gas 4. Line a 12-hole muffin tray with cases or just brush with a little oil.

Mix the dry ingredients and spices in a large bowl.

Add the milk, boiling water and oil. Mix it by hand or with an electric hand mixer till combined. Whisk in the egg.

Fold the squash through till evenly distributed. Be careful not to over-mix.

Fill the cupcake cases or holes till 3/4 full. Bake for 20 mins or till golden and springy. Allow to cool before icing.

The batter freezes well if you don't want to cook up the whole batch.

Mmm, it sounds like it's worth trying! Thanks!

Update: it was pretty good. We all had some warm after tea, when any chocolate cake with large chunks of still oozing chocolate in it would taste good, and the DCs liked it too. I may have sneaked another bit before bed when it was cold - and still good. Though the texture was a little unusual, I would never have guessed it had beans in it in a million years, and it certainly wasn't heavy. The orange, coffee and vanilla made it taste a bit like Maya Gold, which I love. BTW, I interpreted the 'baking soda' to mean 'baking powder', not bicarb - bit lazy of the Guardian not to translate recipes they've copied from blogs into English! But on the whole that's a thumbs up - particularly if you've any gluten free friends to bake for.

Butternut squash sounds good, mylordcopper, if you could bear to type it out. Thank you!

Oooh looking forward to hearing how nice it is!

Re the courgette cake, if you grate if fine, you can't see it at all!
I once served it up at a dinner party and a friend (who is a vegetarian!!!) loved it and asked about the recipe. He nearly fainted when he heard that it had courgette in it and that he had eaten it!!! So if you grate if fine, you can't see it at all!

I've reduced sugar before and replaced them with raisins and currants, and if you put chocolate bits in courgette cakes you get to see the little people vacillating between rejecting green bits and accepting chocolate bits which is quite funny and almost worth it.

Dan Lepard also has a dark blueberry muffin which uses wholemeal flour. I've got a butternut squash one which I can type out if you want it.

I like quite stodgy cake! I'm going to give it a go later when I've actually done some work (am 'working from home'.) and will post news of how it went. Am liking the sound of both the brownies and the chocolate courgette cake - the chocolate would disguise the green, which has been an issue in the past in this house: 'mum, why are there green bits in the cake?'

I saw that recipe and was quite tempted to try it, but it sounds like it might be quite stodgy?

Chocolate courgette cake is to die for!

I've not tried this one but I make black bean brownies quite regularly which are delicious and work really well. And nobody ever guesses they have beans in, either

Oh - I made that alchemist's chocolate cake, and it turned out terribly. In fact it prompted my dad to say 'you do know that the alchemists failed to turn base metals into gold, don't you?'. It looked very much like a cow pat and had all the appeal of one. But maybe I did something wrong - I remember being a bit flummoxed by the boiling stage.

What do I mean by 'real cake? Well, I suppose cake that puts flavour first and everything else second, in terms of quantity of sugar, butter etc. I do like fruit and carrot cakes though - and there are quite a few with veg in the Dan Lepard book that I've been meaning to try. And there's a great Mary Berry courgette cake I love - dense and nutty. But I think the quantity of sugar in that one outdoes any benefits from the courgette!

Last week they had olive oil spice cake which sounds quite good and not too unhealthy.

What do you mean by "real cake"? Does carrot cake count as real cake? If you like that sort of texture you could have some rather nice cakes with butternut squash and courgettes and beetroot and all that.

Oh and I've made this chocolate cake before and it was very nice. Seems quite healthy too. Probably count towards one of your 5-a-day.

Mmm. That date and pecan loaf sounds good. I'll give that a try sometime. The swede and lemon cake was from this book. I've tried quite a few things from there, and they were all OK, but never quite as nice as 'real cake' ifyswim, and just left me thinking I'd have been better off with a smaller piece of the real thing.

And the link as a link.. Date and Pecan Loaf

Not yet but I'm planning on trying it out!
[This [http://broccoliandricecakes.wordpress.com/2012/11/15/date-and-pecan-loaf/ Date and Pecan Loaf]] is my best healthier cake recipe. It is lush! No beans in it but only sweetened with dates and bananas.
Swede lemon cake? Now that's something new to try with swedes...