The Food Monologues

My dad called me last night and asked if there was going to be bringing cakes round as it was my niece's birthday this week.  My sister told me that she was going to buy some cake to bring round, but I thought I had better make some low sugar cakes too, as my mum is diabetic and shouldn't really be eating cake, but as its a birthday treat I didn't want her to miss out.  So at eleven o'clock at night, I set about baking some Hokkaido cupcakes, which are filled mini chiffon cakes which are super light and fairly low in sugar.  I used this recipe, Hokkaido Cup Cake Recipe and tweaked the recipe a bit by using stevia sweetener for half the sugar in the recipe and scaled the recipe to a four egg recipe so that I could make 12 muffin sized cakes.

They rose beautifully in the oven and I had to wait for them to cool down before I could fill them and as soon as they cool down, they will deflate.  As it was past midnight when the cakes were done, I thought I would call it a night and would fill the cakes in the morning.

The early the next morning, as it was snowing outside, I really didn't fancy a trip to the local convenience store to see if they might have any cream, which is what I normally fill Hokkaido cupcakes with so I looked up a recipe for cream patissiere. that was not too sweet and that I had the ingredients for.  I found this Cream Patissiere Recipe that fit my bill.  Substituting with semi skimmed milk (because that was all I had) and replacing half the sugar with stevia again, I added a whole scraped vanilla pod in with the milk as well.  I have never made cream patisserie before but it was very straightforward and I was very pleased with the smooth rich taste - though with the stevia added it tasted a little too sweet, so maybe next time I will reduce the amount I add a little.

Chinese cream cakes, like the ones you get from a Chinese bakery are often topped with a vast array of fruit, and these cupcakes are a little bit like mini Chinese cream cakes.  In my fridge I had some blueberries and kiwi fruit and in my cupboard I had some tinned peaches, so I was good to go and prepped the fruit and was ready to assemble to cakes.  Filling the cakes with the cooled cream patissiere plumps the cakes back up and then topping with lots of fruit to complete the look.  Finally, I finished the cakes off with a small amount of apricot glaze made from apricot jam mixed with a splash of apple juice.

I was pretty pleased with the end result and they went down well with my family, my mum was happy to be able to have a little bit of cake and my dad insisted on keeping any of the remaining cakes for later .  I worked out that each cake contained about 150 calories each and contained about 6g of sugar in total.

Labels: Baking, cake, Using Sweeteners