It’s been such a long time since I participated in a Daring Bakers’ challenge. This month, since I’m on Easter holidays fro Uni, I thought I’d get back involved! And what a great challenge it was to come back on.
Ruth from Makey-Cakey was our March 2013 Daring Bakers’ challenge host. She encouraged us all to get experimental in the kitchen and sneak some hidden veggies into our baking, with surprising and delicious results!
Of course, carrot cake is a no brainer. Courgette cakes and chocolate beetroot cakes are common now also. But I wanted to do something that was, for me, different, and a new experience.
So, I decided to utilize the sweet potatoes in my fridge. I know sweet potato desserts are popular in America, but here in the UK, I don’t think I’ve ever seen one, let alone eaten one.
Continuing the healthy vegetable theme, I decided to try a low fat recipe for miniature cakes. Inspired by this recipe, I used sweet potato puree and added in a chopped dried fig. The texture was a little dense but the flavour was amazing.
The recipe makes one single serving double layer cake or two individual cakes.
The recipe (using stevia) comes in at around 291 calories (for both cakes), so about 145 calories each. Add 40 calories total for the icing drizzle (20 per cake). For nutrition including sugar see the end of the post.
- 1/4 cup/30g plain/spelt/gluten free flour
- 1/2 tsp cinnamon
- 1/4 tsp mixed spice
- 1/4 tsp baking powder
- 1/8 tsp baking soda
- 1/8 tsp salt
- 2.5 tablespoons sugar or granulated stevia
- 1/2 ‘egg’ of choice (I used 1/2 tsp Orgran No Egg)
- 1/4 cup/60g pureed sweet potato
- 1 tablespoon plain yoghurt
- 1 tablespoon melted margarine
- 1/4 tsp pure vanilla extract
- 20g (about 1 large) dried fig, chopped small
- 10g icing sugar
- drop of vanilla
- Preheat oven to 180c/350f.
- In a small bowl, whisk together dry ingredients from flour to sweetener. In another bowl whisk wet ingredients. Then mix dry into wet then stir in the fig.
- Pour into two lightly greased ramekins, or miniature tart tins.
- Bake for 15 minutes or until a skewer comes out without wet batter.
- Leave to cool before removing from tins and icing.
- To make the drizzle, mix the icing sugar with the vanilla and 3/4 tsp water then drizzle over the cakes.
These look delicious. I’m familiar with sweet potatoes, but have never done anything with figs. Thanks for sharing your healthy recipe.
Thank you. I’m on a bit of a fig rampage at the moment, I put them in anything I can! Poppy 🙂
I made sweet potato cookies but love the addition of figs in your cakes and the vanilla glaze sounds delicious 🙂
Recipe sounds delicious, great job on the challenge!
These smaller tarts are vegan & look absolutely fabulous! Another tasty must make of yours! 🙂 MMMMMMMMMMM!
Thank you so much for checking out my post – Your site is a full of mouthwatering recipes!! This recipe has everything I love, will definitely try!
Thanks Sonoko! I love the look of your veggie recipes. Let me know if you try this 🙂
Awesome blog 🙂 Definitely a couple of recipes I will have to try (minus sugar and dairy). How have you found baking with Stevia? I just started dabbling with non-fructose sweeteners recently and I’m finding the liquid Stevia version rather tricky (so bad I had to spit out a recent experiment ;)). Dextrose, on the other hand, I have had many successful recipes with.
Thanks Caroline. Many of my recipes don’t contain dairy now that this is a vegan blog. Sorry to hear about your bad experience with liquid stevia. I use granulated stevia and have always had good results so far. I’ve never baked with dextrose so couldn’t draw a comparison. 🙂
Hi Poppy, that’s awesome, I’ll look out for those and perhaps try granulated stevia instead thanks!
I hope you have a better experience with it! 🙂
Thanks 🙂
🙂