By Published Oct. 17, 2016.
Our recent cookbook, Naturally Sweet, is your ultimate guide to baking with less sugar. Perfect for bakers of all kinds, the book opens with essential information, including a substitution chart and a breakdown of the science of sugar. And best of all, the 120 revolutionary recipes for great-tasting baked goods and desserts rely on less processed sweeteners (like Sucanat, coconut sugar, date sugar, maple syrup, and honey) and taste as good as the originals.
Reducing or changing the sugar in a recipe is no simple task. Tessa of Style Sweet CA agrees. “Since sugar is part of the science-y part of baking, you can’t always simply just take it out completely and hope for the best,” says Tessa. To re-engineer recipes for our favorite baked goods and desserts, we conducted hundreds of rounds of tests in the kitchen to ensure we developed desserts that would taste great and reduce the amount of sugar by 30% to 50%. “When it comes to baking at home for my family, I try to be a bit more health conscious,” says Tessa.
"While I can certainly make you a decadent pastry covered in slabs of butter and encrusted in sugar, turn to Naturally Sweet for all of your other needs," writes Tessa. "Thankfully, the peeps at ATK did all the hard work for us and put it all in this beautiful new book."
I loved the idea of the carrot-honey cake because it called for a sweetener I already had in my pantry—honey!
While reading Naturally Sweet, Tessa came across two classics from the book–Banana Bread and Carrot-Honey Layer Cake–and made a lightly spiced hybrid of the two recipes without using any refined sugars.
“I loved the idea of the carrot-honey cake because it called for a sweetener I already had in my pantry—honey!" writes Tessa. "I had some overripe bananas in my kitchen as well, so I decided to combine the recipes for the ultimate tea time bite and breakfast-y treat!”
For both our Banana Bread and Carrot-Honey Layer Cake recipes, we focused on their namesake ingredients when developing naturally sweet versions. To create great flavor in our Banana Bread, we found that three bananas was the magic number. Plus, we replaced the granulated sugar found in many recipes with Sucanat, since its pleasant molasses flavor married well with the other flavors in the bread. As for our Carrot-Honey Layer Cake, we use four carrots and add cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves to bolster the cake’s flavor.
Our test kitchen teams rely on the same rigorous development process and share the same commitment to creating reliable recipes and trustworthy reviews.
