Baking challenge #5, 6, 7 & 8 - partial failure, almost total failure, failure and success!

Never knew that baking could make me depressed but when things don’t work out the way I want, I’ve discovered that it really gets to me. I was trying to be creative for my ‘no-sugar, no-wheat, no-other-stuff friend’ and used my recipe for marmalade-pecan tea bread to turn it into a – you guessed it – no-sugar and no-wheat tea bread. I threw out the sugar and cinnamon, used 100 % fruit preserve (raspberry) instead of marmalade and doubled the amount to compensate for the sugar (used sheep’s yoghurt instead of cows because she also doesn’t eat cows dairy with the exception of butter, and used wholemeal spelt flour instead of regular flour). It didn’t turn out well....wasn’t very bad either though. There are positive things to be said about this tea bread. It was very moist, sweet enough and you could actually taste the raspberry. Negative things about it are the abundance of raspberry seeds and the tartness. If you're a fan of raspberry preserve on sourdough bread without butter you might like it....but I cannot say that I recommend it.
I don’t know why but I wanted to stick with the marmalade-pecan tea bread as starting point. In retrospect not a good choice....
Whilst in the supermarket I saw a jar of date honey (dates made liquid) and thought that it would make a good substitute for sugar...dates worked well in the dried fruit muffins I made last week so why not use it instead of sugar in my marmalade-pecan tea bread recipe? I used about 25 % more of the date honey than sugar because date honey consist of about 75 % sugars (this is my logic ;). Didn’t have too much sheep’s yoghurt left so used only half of what the recipe called for. But I figured there was more liquid because of the date honey anyway so it would probably be ok (again my logic). Turned out that my logic wasn’t logical at all! The results were edible in the sense that it would (most probably) not hurt the human body if eaten. The bread was dry and tasted like it was burnt....looked burnt as well but that could have been the date honey in theory (in practice I just baked it too long for the amount of fluid inside). The lesson I learned from all this was that my creativity is all nice and stuff but thinking something might work doesn’t mean it actually will! I felt really depressed after the date honey tea bread...felt like I really sucked at baking... Haven’t even photographed the tea breads because they sucked and looked ugly anyway.
Luckily all I needed was a good nights rest to cure me from my baking depression. With newfound courage I started baking a recipe that I had already tried out last week and failed at (oops...haven’t told you about that one!). Think the failing was my punishment for thinking I could outsmart the great Donna Hay (used her recipe for maple syrup cakes). Instead of using sugar and maple syrup which the recipe asked for, I used only maple syrup. As usual I didn’t use regular flour but wholemeal spelt flour. I had read on the great and wise Internet that you should add half a teaspoon of baking soda per cup maple syrup if you used it in place of sugar. Thought that the fact that I was using wholemeal flour also meant I had to use a little more baking powder....wholemeal being heavier... Anyway...I used more baking powder than the great Donna Hay told me to use...the results:


Conclusion: Don’t mess with Donna!
Their appearance may not be very appealing but their taste was! Definitely a keeper! Made them again and this time with the amount of baking powder Donna called for. Taste was very good: sweet and maple-y. The texture was airy and cakey and not too fat. They looked much better too (see pic at top of page). Glad I can still bake!

Plan on making a cheese cake without sugar, wheat and cows dairy in a few days without testing it first...living on the edge ;)
I’ll keep you posted....

Mini maple syrup cakes (adapted from Modern Classics Book 2 by Donna Hay)

makes about 30

115 g wholemeal spelt flour
½ ts baking soda
½ ts baking powder
50 g butter, diced and at room temperature
140 ml maple syrup
1 egg
30 mini muffin paper cups (mine were 3 cm (1.2 in) at the bottom and 1.7 cm (0.7 in) in height)

Preheat the oven at 180ºC. Sift the flour with the baking soda and baking powder.
Mix the butter and maple syrup until it looks more or less smooth. Add the egg and mix until smooth. Add the flour mixture and mix until just combined. Fill the paper cups and bake for 15 minutes.

1 mini cake – 118 kcal
100 g – 393 kcal

carbohydrate 61 g – protein 6 g – fat 12 g (saturated fat 7 g) – fibre 3 g