sweetner instead of sugar in cake recipies ?

mumofthetwins

Hi
I now have to get seriously back into weightwatchers
I really like baking cakes and muffins and tea loaf mmmmm but i was wondering if it would be possible to use sweetner instead of sugar ??
Any advice would be great
Lisa

inspace

Im no expert but a few years ago there where lots of recipes for cakes with splenda ect I tried a few but not great results then i did half and half with sugar it was better.
Adding fruit gets better results so we now do that.
I watched a cooking program on tv saying that some sweetners lose taste when baked but that foxed me becuase surely it cant be the heat that does it or else it would spoil in your tea/coffee.

inspace

Heres a good page which might help.

http://allrecipes.com/howto/baking-with-sugar-and-sugar-substitutes/

Edwardia

The problem with artificial sweeteners is that they're actually sweeter than sugar, some by 600 times, so they won't diminish your sweet tooth at all. Some also have an unpleasant after taste and others don't do well when cooked.

Granted I low carb and many people can't handle that, but when you think about all the diet plans out there, things like Weight Watchers allow you WW puddings so they aren't encouraging dieters to change their eating habits. Diet plans that rely on drinks and bars are also unrealistic because that's not sustainable long term.

However we choose to lose weight, when we reach target weight, the way of eating has to be sustainable ie not leaving us feeling half starved and having educated us to stop eating the things that made us fat.

All too often they don't and personally I think well if a diet worked 100% well, people would do one, never do it again and then all these companies would lose millions.. or am I just cynical ?

OrkneyStar

I often find cakes etc taste pretty much the same if I use half the amount of recommended sugar (and I do have a sweet tooth believe me!). I think the taste of sweeteners would ruin a cake and you are better having decent tasting cake but slightly less often/smaller slices!

recovering_spendaholic

i regularly use sweetner instead of sugar but the key is to substitute by volume and not by weight - if a recipe calls for 150g sugar then you need to find out what that is in terms of cups or fluid oz and then use that amount of sweetner. It also depends on the type of sweetner you use. Candarel or aspartame based sweetner doesn't stand up to the heat of baking but splenda or sucralose based sweetners are okay.

zzybee

i've tried using the aspartame based sweetners in muffins half expecting it to fail...but surprisingly it was alright. not sure about the physics. maybe it was because it was a banana and walnut muffin but worth a try in small batches with sweetners!

System

zzybee wrote: »

i've tried using the aspartame based sweetners in muffins half expecting it to fail...but surprisingly it was alright. not sure about the physics. maybe it was because it was a banana and walnut muffin but worth a try in small batches with sweetners!

aspartame is one of the worst sweetners and we avoid at all costs