Marie Antoinette supposedly said, “Let them eat cake” when told that the peasants had no bread (their staple diet) and were starving. (The quote has also been attributed, perhaps more accurately, to the wife of Louis XIV, Marie-Therese, who lived a century before.) The example was to show how ignorant the French upper class was to the common man’s predicament, as at that time cake (brioche) was hugely more expensive than bread.
Nowadays many of us have the opposite problem. We have all the bread and cake we could possibly need, and most of us eat a lot more than we should. We know that to have a healthy diet we shouldn’t really eat cake. But is there a way that we can have our cake and eat it too? This is a pretty frivolous look at the subject of health, but here it is anyway.
Even little changes can make a difference. If you want cake, cook it yourself from scratch. Live by the rule that you can have any kind of junk food you want, but you have to prepare it yourself from real ingredients. It slows you down but doesn’t put anything totally out of bounds. (It helps if you’re a great cook, of course.)
You just must have cake? Zucchini works in some recipes, pumpkin makes a moist cake or great scones and beetroot can go into chocolate cake, and where would a carrot cake be without …? Then there’s apple cake, banana cake, rhubarb cake, carrot and apricot muffins, all kinds of fruit loaves. Many berries work well in cakes and muffins.
So pick a kind of cake, do some research and you’re well on your way to at least slightly healthier cake than the store-bought stuff.
Here’s one recipe to start you off. It’s deliciously moist with a slight tang—and it’s as far from health food as you can get. But we’re hastening slowly here. If this replaces cake with some ingredients you can’t even pronounce, it’s a step in the right direction. It’s also an incredibly easy recipe and once you’ve made it a couple of times you can start tweaking ingredients, substituting wholemeal flour for the white, maple syrup for the sugar et cetera.
WHOLE ORANGE CAKE
1 whole navel orange, including skin
150g butter, melted
3 eggs
1 cup caster sugar or substantially less
1 ½ cups SR flour
1. Preheat oven to 180 degrees C (350 degrees F)
2. Grease a cake tin and line base and sides with baking paper
3. Cut the orange into bits and discard any really big pieces of pith
4. Process in food processor to slightly chunky mush.
5. Add all other ingredients and process until well mixed.
6. Bake for 40 to 45 minutes.
This is quite a dense cake. It freezes well, which is good when you’re looking for something extra to pop into your lunchbox. Don’t ice. We’re trying to be slightly healthy here!