Baking cakes...

Coconut macaroons and bacon+cheese pancakes.

Made some gingerbread.

Square cheese scones. They will set off them people who dislike square plates and can't comprehend a scone that isn't round.

Still on the scones so chocolate chip and cinnamon square scones.

Square scones I can deal with.

Sweet scones less so....

Made some quiche and really happy with how it came out.

The near tray are Paprika+Cheddar scones and the far tray are Red Leicester scones...will mix them up and play scone roulette.

I said to a friend who has diabetes that I'll bake him a cake. I can see all sorts of recipes online but I also have tried and tested recipes that I know work very well with normal sugar. My quesiton is, if a recipe calls for 1 cup of sugar, do I simply replace with 1 cup of sweetener? Or is it more complicated than that? The grams are confusing me a bit as sweetener is lighter than sugar so...

@ExTra it depends on what the recipe is doing to the sugar or sweetener at the time, if you are making for example brownies then usually the sugar melts into the chocolate+butter which some sweetners can't do so it won't work, most french recipes that beat sugar with eggs into a meringue which I don't think will work with a sweetener. Even different sugars aren't all that interchangeable imo so I've got 7 or so types of sugar at home now(and 9 or so types of flour).

What sort of cake did you say you would make them?

I made chocolate tart the other day and it's only got 5 teaspoons of caster sugar(I could easy have put less) not much sugar in the dark chocolate either, full of cream.

I have made an upside down peach lemon cake with caster sugar yesterday and I said I'd make him that, so yeah it's very much beating the sugar / sweetener with butter and eggs...

I bought this

They seem to have some recipes made for it and more a range of products that each get used in a different way. You might be able to work out what/how to substitute correctly based on what they do with it in some of them? The "sugarly" one looks to be easier to substitute.

http://www.canderel.co.uk/recipes/
http://www.canderel.co.uk/products/

http://www.canderel.co.uk/faq/
Can you use Canderel® for cooking and baking?
CANDEREL® Sucralose is specially formulated to withstand high temperatures as it is heat stable so is perfect for recipes that require high temperatures.
Other Canderel granular products are perfect for simple and easy meals such as sprinkling on fruit or cereal or for recipes that don’t require cooking at high temperatures. Find recipes tailored for each product in the Canderel Kitchen for inspiration.

Do cooking times vary when substituting sugar with Canderel® granular?
Usually recipes made with CANDEREL® granular require a shorter cooking time, especially cakes. Remember to look for visual signs that your recipe is done. The look and feel of your recipe is the best indicator.

I just bumped into a friend who has done it before and said it will work but the cake would be nowhere near as nice...

She said one of the main issue is the amount of sweetener needed, with the canderel I have bought, it says 10g to 80g of sugar, so for the cake I intened to bake it will only need less than 20g of sweetener... so... I am going to give it a go anyway and see what happens...

Interested in how it turns out not that I'll rush to use less sugar just good for general baking knowledge.

I just made these, I've managed to find ways of making my pastry thinner so the smaller ones can have more chocolate in them than last time. Fingers crossed they have cooled enough by 3pm so I can take them to my friend in Sutton.

Can I be your friend?

Sure, the bar is set very low anyway lol

Yay! What are you baking next?

I did a quick test tonight with the sweetener and the cake has turned out better than I had expected. However:

1. The 1:8 ratio is not sweet enough. The receipt says 150g sugar, and I only wanted to bake half a cake to test, so 75g sugar should equate to just under 10g sweetener. Well, the cake isn't sweet at all. I can taste the salt.

2. Far less sweetener than sugar means the mixture is less and feels more sticky so harder to spread in the tin

3. It took less time to bake, almost half, but then I only backed half a cake this time

4. The colour is quite pale, it doesn't brown up and it rises a little less than when using sugar.

As for the taste, the jury is still out as I need to work out a better sweetener / sugar ratio before I can decide, maybe it's not as fluffy, but the texture is far better than the vegan friendly cake I baked the other day.

You see the red layer in the middle, it was bits from my frozen berries, I think with the real one, I will sweeten the berries properly and have a thicker layer in the middle as well as the bottom (top), so even if the cake itself turns out to be not sweet enough, the fruits should compensate it.

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I'm not sure, I bake lots so don't tend to think that far ahead maybe a cheesecake or macarons, I'm thinking my neighbour will like macarons.

1. I think that's a science thing of how sugar+salt work together, salt tends to bring out the flavour in things but instead of bringing out sweet sugar it's bringing out chemical sweetner. I'd look if the recipes using sweetners still have salt, they might drop it as rather than seasoning with salt it's seasoning with the sweetner.
   
2. Would be more a dough?
   
3. Baking times tend to depend on thickness so half a cake could do that, I just use a cake tester and stab my stuff once it's near time.
   
4. It won't give you colour all the way but you could brush the top with egg or milk, it's what people do with pastry and scones to give the top colour(if you look up a few posts you can see on the square ones I made where I brushed the top but not sides). edit - just thinking how dumb that is being a batter rather than a dough maybe add cinnamon or nutmeg or something with a colour it would change the end result flavour lots tho
   
   

Fruit can be really high in sugar so be sure to measure and warn your friend how much is contained in each portion/slice/cake.

edit again - did you put vanilla extract in? it's a very good sweetner.

See you at about 3pm today? :-)

Do you know what, I had another couple of bites at it Sunday afternoon and it tasted sweeter, maybe it needs to be kept overnight before eating? And yes, it's more of a dough than cake mixture, it actually tastes a bit a cross between cake and scone... I actually quite like it...

About the colour, my intention is an upside down cake, so what cares about what the bottom (top) looks like?

Also I asked my friend says fruit sugar is OK as long as he doesn't eat the entire fruit stall at once... it's sugar sugar that his body cannot process, fruit sugar is nature so it's OK as long as it doens't eat more than a normal person would...

And no, I didn't, I don't really put vanilla extract in my cakes, probably should start doing it...

my first attempt at baking some scone thingy, they have onions, cheese and sun kissed tomatoes inside. Taste better than they look. I think I put too much milk so they have turned out too soft... well, there is always next time, innit!

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Made my first cheesecake.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfeyUGZt8nk

Made another cheesecake but this time grated chocolate on top so it looks a bit better.

Still having fun with cheesecakes so this time I made one with milk chocolate and then dusted the top with cocoa, I think it's the best looking top yet.

Also made a carrot cake but not sure it's cooked enough, my neighbour and partner have both said it's good.

@Clockwise, have you tried putting jelly on a cake? Being so hot this week I was thinking to make some lemon sponge and add a layer of jelly with fruits on top. I did a cracking (even if I say so myself) lemon dizzle cake with lemon icing, but that fucker kind of melted half way through the day, so I want something that will have an excuse to live in a fridge in any case...

All recipes suggest a layer of sponge topped with a layer of cream / mousse etc before adding the jelly (there is a completly cooling between layers obvs), it's for taste as much as a barrier not to soak the sponge, but I am thinking, would a thin / invisble layer of lemon glaze work as a barrier just as well?

With the jelly, obvs, it will only go on with it's beginning to set so probably already cooling down so it should still stick...?

@ExTra I haven't done much with jelly but have a rough idea how it works. Often they encourage backing the jelly with a white cream as the colour of the jelly comes up better than on top of a textured+dark cake top.

I don't think the lemon glaze would work if it's like a lemon drizzle one as they are known to soak in(I even stabbed some extra holes with a cake tester when I made my last one to encourage it more).

You could if you wanted make the cake in a springform tin then make the jelly in another springform tin the same size, slice the top of the cake to be flat and then stack them using your lemon drizzle sugar mix a bit like glue(?) as it shouldn't need to barrier against the set jelly. But this might also fall apart if the top moves.

I don't really like cream which is why i am thinking an alternative, would a layer of lemon curd work then, you think? Barring the yellowish look...

I might just go with some cream as a safer option though... hummmm....

The lemon cake I made last week was technically lemon brownies, so it is flat anyway, so I was actually thinking baking them in mini loaf tins and add the jelly on top rather than making individual layers, I am kind of a lazy baker...