It’s the 26th of June soon, which for some people has meaning as being an anniversary of the day I was born. Traditionally, people give and eat cake on their birthday, but not being a blind follower of tradition I’ve decided that I’d prefer other things.
Being “healthy” (I don’t think about it that much, I just eat whatever I want, when I want, it just happens that all of this happens to be “healthy”) cake doesn’t really appeal to me. I’m not personally against it – I’ll eat it sometimes, and sometimes it tastes very good, but other times it doesn’t appeal and doesn’t taste nice. Instead, I’ve found other foods which I would prefer to eat to cake. I know, sounds crazy, and I’m sure most of you are reading this thinking “Cake is the best food in the world (apart from bacon), you’re an idiot”.
But I’ve been there, thought that, changed my taste and my diet, and now I think otherwise. I’m in the position having tried out eating different things, so maybe when I say there are better things than cake you might want to give it a go – but suit yourself, your loss.
So I’ve found a couple of new favourite foods that have replaced cake in my diet – mostly because they taste better (to me, taste is subjective and changes) but also because they are “healthier”. Actually replaced, so I make them a few times a week if I have time and eat them like desert or a snack.
The reason I call them “healthier” is because comparing their ingredients to cake, the ingredients are better and more natural looking and have more vitamins/minerals/etc. Flour and sugar are both sugars in complex and simple forms and offer little else to the body. The other ingredients have much more variety.
Cake: flour, sugar, egg, butter/margarine.
Chocolate marzipan: Almonds (40%), honey (30%), chocolate solids (25%), sugar (5%).
Kugeln: Dates or other fruit, cashews or other nuts, chocolate/marzipan/coconut/anything else.
So “healthier” ingredient AND a better taste. It’s a winner.
1. (Chocolate) Marzipan
I love marzipan – or at least, when it’s good quality. You can go to a shop and buy something that claims to be marzipan, but is in fact only 30% almonds and is packed with fructose-glucose-syrup and other things. I don’t like that. I like good quality marzipan. The best one I’ve found so far is 57% almonds and the only other ingredient is honey (typically marzipan is mixed with sugar, but honey is in general a bit “healthier” than raw sugar). You can also make your own marzipan, which is probably cheaper, but I haven’t tried that yet.
But nice as this marzipan was, I found myself in a shop that had chocolate marzipan in it. MMM. But, checking the ingredients, the marzipan wasn’t very good quality and nor was the chocolate (see my post about proper dark chocolate being superior). So I thought I’d make my own chocolate marzipan.
Two methods:
1. Cut up the marzipan into small pieces (or whatever you want), then dip it in melted chocolate. Self-explanatory, I did it in my low-tech kitchen using an empty jar submerged in hot water, then dipped the marzipan in using cocktail sticks and transferred the marzipan-covered-in-melted-chocolate quickly into the freezer so that as much as possible stayed on.
2. Put marzipan and chocolate in a food processor/blender (or do it by hand if you don’t have one), combine them, then reform it. I tried it out with 100g marzipan and 50g of 85% dark chocolate (not melted), cut both up into smaller squares to make it easier for the food processor, then turned it on and waited while it rattled around and chopped both ingredients up into small bits, then formed them into balls using my hand. I’m sure you could use cocoa powder instead of chocolate, or form it in an ice-cube tray or into a tin and chop it up or whatever, or crush the chocolate yourself and then smush it all together. Just combine the two things.
The two taste different. I found the chocolate coated marzipan (#1) to be more filling, because of the bitter chocolate on the outside and marzipan in the middle, and I found the combined one to be more moreish. They’re just different things.
I’m sure I’ll experiment more with this, make marzipan myself, or combine other things with it. I saw some pumpkin-seed marzipan in a cafe once, so maybe I’ll start chucking other things in to see what flavours work well.
2. Kugeln
(Kugeln is a German word for a spherical object, like a bowling ball, and I’ve seen this sort of food refered to as “Energie Kugeln” before).
This foodstuff is more a concept than a particular recipe, flexible like the marzipan one but more so. The basic idea (and the advanced idea, it’s pretty simple) is to mash stuff up, typically dried fruit and nuts, but also other things, then combine them. That’s all there is to it, but some people prefer their recipes to have more information, so I’ll give you some.
I discovered these by seeing Nakd bars (as a “healthy” energy bar product), trying them and liking them, then seeing the ingredients that they had helpfully listed on the back and thinking I could try myself. Their most basic one was 51% dates 49% cashews. Then I experimented.
In cake-size pieces, served like cake.
Method:
1a) If you have a food processor, then put in all of the nuts first and spin it around so that the nuts are in small pieces (or bigger depending on what consistency you want). Then add in the dates (or other fruit), but not all at once (if you do it all at once then the dates often stick to each other instead of being mixed in with the nuts). Then add in the other things. You can tell if the consistency is sticky enough by looking at it – when you turn off the blade, it should stay standing and collapse slowly instead of all being flat – or by trying to press it together in your hands and seeing how well it sticks.
1b) If you don’t have a food processor, then mash up the fruit and the not-fruit separately. For fruit, cut it up small, then mash it with a fork or squash it with blunt thing. For the nuts, put them instead a plastic bag and beat it with something, use a rolling pin, stamp on it, etc. A hand blender can help too. Then combine them in a bowl, use your hands and fingers to mix it all together.
2) Then form it into whatever shape you want. I either put it in a rectangular tray/box to then cut up later or roll it into balls with my hands. You could also use an ice cream scoop thing or muffin case or ice cube tray etc. Sometimes it’s useful to put it in the fridge or freezer to make it stick together (especially if there’s melted chocolate).
Ingredients:
Like I said, it’s pretty flexible. I usually use dates as the base fruit (because they’re cheap, sticky, and don’t have too much flavour), but you can use figs, apricots, banana, mango, etc, depending on what you want. If the dates are too dry then they don’t stick well. My mum and I once did a test where we bought four different types of date from tesco and tried them all out (medjool were the best, but cost more; deglet nour gave us the best stickiness for price). Banana and mango are a bit more liquidy, which makes them harder to hold once they’re done, so I’d still use dates as the base if I wanted to use these. Cashews are a good nut because they’re buttery, whereas almonds or hazelnuts are a bit more powdery, but you can combine it all. Coconut oil can be used to help it stick a bit if it’s dry. Melted chocolate also helps it all to stick together, but cocoa powder or chocolate (once it’s been broken up by the processor) work the same for taste.
Here’s a few different combinations I’ve used. Percentages are estimates as it depends on consistencies of other things.
- Standard: dates (55%) and cashews (45%). Tastes great just with these two.
- Chocolate. Same base ratio with some form of chocolate (melted, cocoa powder, solid).
- Chocolate orange (also with orange oil).
- Marzipan. Standard plus marzipan (usually 30% marzipan, 40% dates, 30% cashews)
- Gingerbread. Standard, but swap some of the nuts for almonds, and put in ginger and cloves as spices.
- Pecan Pie. 40% dates, 30% cashews, 30% pecans. Pecans are oily and that helps it to stick.
- Coconut-orange. With coconut oil (and desecated coconut flakes if you want) and orange oil.
If you want some for a dinner party, I recommend making pecan pie, rolling it into balls, half-dipping them into melted dark chocolate (then freezing them so it stays on), and serving them like truffles. Or make the marzipan ones, with lots of marzipan so it’s sticky, and then roll them in cocoa powder to stick to the outside of it (and give a nice bitter contrast with the inside).
Conclusion
If you want to get me something for my birthday – or anytime – then these are preferable to cake. Experiment and let me know what you think of it or if you have any other ideas and combinations.
I would’ve put more pictures to show you how good they all look – but I don’t have any at the moment and I’m not trying to sell you anything. If you try it out following my recommendation, good for you; if not, your loss.
Regarding the word “healthy”:
You might have noticed that I use the word “healthy” in quotes. This is because I find it a silly word to use, but am using it in the way society generally might. Here’s a quick (but incomplete) explanation of why I think it’s silly:
Your body and stomach do not exist in a vacuum: it is incomplete to say “an apple is healthier than poison” because it all depends on circumstances (for example, if somebody has already eaten ten apples and the ‘poison’ is in a small dose as a medicine). It’s entirely context and person dependent. For an obese person doing no exercise, going on a fasting or calorie restricted diet might be “healthy”; for a malnourished person, this would be terrible and they need to eat lots. If I’ve already had three apples in a day, the fourth one won’t help much; if I’m trekking through the arctic and have run out of food apart from chocolate cake, then it is certainly healthy for me to eat it because I need the energy. Et cetera, et cetera.