Relatively healthy chocolate orange cake

I've recently subscribed to the RSS feed for Fat Free Vegan, which has glorious photography and achievable but interesting recipes that I might not otherwise ever try. I am not vegan, by the way — the closest description would probably be pescetarian. But most of the food I cook and eat is vegetarian, and a lot of that in turn is vegan.

Full disclosure: I only found the blog by chance, and I can't even remember what I was looking for when I got there. But there I was, browsing the most popular recipes, when I was hit right between the eyes by Susan's chocolate orange cake.

O.M.G: fat-free chocolate cake. Sweet tooth nirvana.

But even then, I wasn't satisfied — I am, evidently, very hard to please. Serious Bunny and I generally stick to a low g.i. diet; more about that another time. So I made some modifications ...

Instead of a 50/50 mix of unbleached and whole wheat flour, I used all spelt flour.
I substituted Splenda for the sugar.
I substituted our usual dairy fat-free yoghurt for the soy yoghurt, since that's what we had in the house ;)

For the chocolate and orange icing, I made a 60/40 mix of Splenda and cornflour instead of using powdered sugar. Since there isn't all that much powdered sugar in the icing, I probably could have gotten away with it, but I figured, hell, let's make this as low-g.i. as possible. It actually worked out pretty well: the orange icing dried a little powdery in a couple of places, and it didn't have that nice glazed look that real icing has, but it didn't look half bad, either.

And as for the proof of the pudding being in the eating ... it tasted really good! (despite my having put too much salt in: I only made half the quantity of batter but for some reason forgot to divide by two for the salt. However, 1 tsp struck me as an awful lot of salt, so I went a bit light on that. Good job). Serious Bunny, for whom I have not cooked many cakes, was impressed.

(As an aside, this was my first time using Splenda - previously we've used Canderel, but I noticed some Splenda in the shop the other day and thought I'd give it a go. Good thing: being made of sucralose, it's much more robust to the effects of baking than Canderel (made with aspartame), which tends to lose a lot of its sweetness when cooked. So I will be buying Splenda again.)

It was a good day. Kudos and thanks to Susan over at Fat Free Vegan for the recipe! And if you think this cake doesn't sound exotic enough for you, check out this prizewinning chocolate cake, made with spinach and zucchini :)

Comments

[Ricki]

Hey, Curious Bunny!
Thanks so much for linking to my blog post; it is much appreciated. (My sweetheart isn't a vegan, but he loved the cakes anyway.) Oh, and I'm an academic living in Canada with dreams of visiting the UK again (my best friend lives there)--I just love these coincidences that happen in the world of blogging! And I love Susan's blog, too. :)