Hungry Jenny Faux Pas: A Healthy Apple Cake Fit For...

...er, no-one.

Damn, I thought I was doing ok. I haven't had a major Hungry Jenny Faux-Pas for quite a while.

After a few weeks of baking different cakes (and testing them out on hungry aikido guys after our training sessions), I decided to branch out into a seemingly healthy recipe which calls for no sugar and no butter. Yes, I thought, I can bake my healthy cake and eat it too.

Well, now I realise that perhaps I'm just not ready to take that next step yet:

Would you eat this?

Well?

If you said yes - well, I applaud you because to me this does not look very appealing! If you said no, then well done, that's the right answer. There was a split-second of hesistation about whether I should actually serve this up to people. This was quickly shot when I tasted a whole piece properly.

And promptly spat it out.

Now, there was nothing wrong with the flavour, so I want to take a half point for that at least. It's got apples, cinnamon and nutmeg. Can't go wrong there. But the texture. There was something VERY wrong with the texture. It was kind of chewy. And not in a nice flapjack way. Sort of harder than that. "What, like caramel?" asked my housemate Grace.

"No, like...a texture I've never tasted before" I muttered, thinking hard about what made it taste so wrong. Is this what butter-free, sugar-free cakes are meant to taste like? I know some healthy foods just can't shake off that label of tasting bland or like rabbit food but I'm quite certain that this disaster was purely caused by my baking ability.

For one, I was meant to use an apple puree, rather than being lazy and throwing in bits of diced apple instead. So maybe that's why nothing really mixed in together properly. This resulted in the lack of flour incorporation, which if you hadn't noticed already, can spot from the bits of dry flour on the finished cake.

"It does tastes nice" Grace commented, as she chewed a small piece.

My heart lifted a little. "Oh, did you want me to save you a couple of pieces then?" as I hovered over the bin with the sorry mess.

"Erm, nah...you're ok"

Sums it up really, doesn't it?

Fancy a laugh at my other Hungry-Jenny-Faux-Pas?