Stevia Week Recipe #3: Chocolate Ginger Cake

Did you miss Stevia Week Recipes #1 & #2?

• Raw Almond Cookies
• Double Carob Chip Ice Cream

Or, God forbid, the stevia giveaway itself?

Assuming you’ve got that taken care of, onward with experimental recipe #3! And I do mean experimental—I do not consider myself a skilled baker, and at first I thought my Chocolate Ginger Cake idea didn’t turn out very well. After a night in the fridge, however, it tasted a lot better to me! Go figure. Sometimes I think the fridge is a better cook than I am, or that it must at least have some mysterious, Magical Deliciousness Elves living in it. Perhaps they’re related to the Magical Deliciousness Elves that live in my slow cooker.

Anyway, for this recipe, I used NuNaturals NuStevia Sweetener Stevia Baking Blend in place of sugar. This can be substituted for sugar in a 1:1 ratio. No-brainer!

Chocolate Ginger Cake (Vegan)

Ingredients:

• 1/4 cup unsweetened applesauce
• 2 tbsp coconut oil
• 1/3 cup NuNaturals Stevia Baking Blend (or sugar)
• 1 cup non-dairy milk (I used hemp)
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 cup whole wheat pastry flour
• 1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/4 cup crystallized ginger, chopped

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350*.
2. Mix applesauce through vanilla in a large bowl.
3. Whisk together dry ingredients (flour through salt) in a smaller bowl.
4. Add dry mixture to the wet mixture gradually, stirring until just combined.
5. Stir in the candied ginger. Pour batter into a greased baking dish (I used an 8”x8” square, glass dish).
6. Bake for 20 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.

Now for a few words about this cake: it probably doesn’t taste quite like you’d imagine it does. As I said a few posts ago, I prefer to err on the side of less sweet where stevia is concerned, and in retrospect, I could have probably safely used 1/2 cup baking blend in this recipe. It’s not sweet like birthday cake from a boxed mix is sweet.

I guess that’s what I was expecting when I first tasted it, though, and that’s why I originally thought this was a bit of a fail. Kind of surprising, considering how great it smelled while baking, not to mention that there’s nothing much better than baked goods fresh from the oven.

After cooling in the fridge, though, it totally grew on me. Part of this is the expectation, though. As you can see from the pictures, this is not the kind of cake you frost and stick candles in. The combination of chocolate, ginger and coconut oil gives it a mildly sweet yet somehow slightly salty flavor that begs for a cozy-hot beverage and bitchy girl talk. Or high tea. Same difference.

So what do you prefer: cake, cookies or ice cream? We’ve had all three this week already…what ever could tomorrow’s stevia recipe be??? ;)