Eating healthily can be difficult sometimes. You might want something cakey, or you want a fry-up, or something deep fried. It’s impossible to always completely avoid these things, so why not try making bad food better, while retaining or sometimes even improving the flavours you crave? This Food Friday at Crafterways, I’m going to give you some tips on how to do this.

First, let’s take the traditional fry-up. It usually consists of bacon, sausage, egg, tomato, onion, bread, baked beans, hash browns/chips/some form of potato fried or deep fried, and numerous other additions depending on what you like. Really bad, right? Doesn’t have to be.

Don’t fry anything – I know this sounds silly if you’re having a fry-up, but this actually works. Oven cook sausages and bacon on a mesh so the fat can drip off to a baking tray underneath. When it cools you’ll see how much fat you didn’t eat! Roast cherry tomatoes whole in balsamic vinegar. Roast the onion in foil. Roast the mushrooms. Have toast instead of fried bread. Put small potatoes in the oven and roast them too. All without any oil. Poach the egg. You’ll be surprised how delicious it turns out to be.
Make fat free cake – I proved last week with my Raspberry Marbled Drizzle Cake that you can lower calories in cake pretty easily.
Replace the sugar in things with golden syrup – This sounds like it should still be bad and I guess it is, but it does help. Golden syrup is much sweeter than sugar so you need less of it, so you actually end up with less calories for the same sweetness.
Or even better replace sugar with honey
Swap chocolates – Instead of eating loads of cheap chocolates, buy some really nice chocolate, maybe with some sort of flavour (I’ve just found Elizabeth Shaw’s blackberry and ginger chocolate for instance) and really enjoy it. You’ll only want a square now and then.
Don’t use normal batter – I’m not going to go into details here, as I’m currently fine-tuning a VERY low calorie yet flavoursome batter, but if you enjoy cooking, get inventive and see if you can think of anything.
Make your own pizza – It’s really quick and you can put on less cheese and more veg and it’s still delicious. I’ll do a tutorial on this soon.

There are many more ways of making bad food better. If you have a way that I haven’t listed here, please do let me know!

Look out for my next post on Monday which will be a tutorial on how to make something crafty and fun.

I wasn’t sure what to name this cake. I’ve been experimenting with various forms of fat free cakes lately, and this is the latest creation. Fair enough, it’s not quite fat-free, but very close!

Believe it or not, it’s only 238 kcalories a slice (if a slice is 1/8th of a cake). The inspiration for this was a lemon drizzle cake that I made, but that turned out a bit too dense. I wanted to try again, but didn’t want more lemon. So instead I turned to the lovely raspberry.

Recipe

Ingredients:

3 large eggs
125g caster sugar (I used golden) (If you’re not from Britain, this is whatever you would usually make cakes with. Fairly fine, but still grains.)
A drop of vanilla extract
150g raspberries
200g self raising flour
85g icing/powdered sugar
150ml water
100ml milk
1tsp baking powder
Pinch salt

~238 calories per 1/8th cake

You’ll also need:
A loaf tin, mixing bowl, scales, electric whisk (or be very very good at whisking!), saucepan, spoon, sieve, smaller bowl, spatula and skewer.

Method:

Raspberry Sauce:

Put raspberries and water (150ml) in a saucepan and cook on a medium heat until mashy, stirring occasionally.
Filter the raspberries through the sieve (a tea strainer also works for this) to get rid of all the pips. Stir it and squish it until you have all the lovely juice.
Put the juice back into the saucepan and add 25g of the icing sugar. Heat and stir until dissolved.
Put raspberry sauce to the side to cool.

Cake:

Lightly grease the tin with whatever you choose (I used vegetable oil) then dust this in a coat of flour. Pre-heat the oven to gas mark 6 / 400F / 200C (take off 20 if fan assisted).
Separate the eggs, with the egg whites in your main mixing bowl.
Whisk the egg whites until stiff peaks.
Add in sugar and whisk this in too.
Lightly stir the egg yolks, vanilla extract and milk together.
Now sieve into the mix the flour, baking powder and salt, add the eggy milk mix.
Fold all the ingredients together.
Pour mix into loaf tin.
Take several spoonfuls of raspberry sauce and pour them on the top of the cake mix all over. Use your skewer to drag through the mixture all the way to the bottom to make the marbled effect. Don’t over-do this as it’ll burst too many bubbles.
Cook for 30 minutes.
When cooked, a skewer pierced into the middle of the cake should come out clean. If not give it another 5 minutes. Take out of the oven and put on a cooling rack (still in tin).
Take 50g of icing sugar and mix it with 5 tbsp of the leftover sauce. Mix until smooth then pour all over the top of the cake (still in the tin).
Leave to cool then turn out when cold.
Serve with vanilla ice cream and some of the spare sauce drizzled on top, or just enjoy it as a slice of delicious moist raspberry cake.

The finished cake, ready to eat:

Made by you Mondays at Skip to my Lou

Crafterways

Tag Archives: cake

Food Friday – Making Bad Food Better

Food Friday – Raspberry Marbled Drizzle Cake

Recipe

Ingredients:

Method: