Baking without sugar is quite popular due to diets
and the prevalence of both type 2 and type 1 diabetes. There are many
different sweeteners that can be used in baking cakes and cookies and
some work better than others. Some sugar substitutes are disastrous when
mixed in traditional cake recipes. Some of the sweeteners you might see
in recipes are:
- Agave Nectar: This is not a healthy sweetener, it is very similar to high fructose corn syrup, but it will work in recipes that call for honey. Use it in the same amount as honey.
- Applesauce: you can swap out sugar with the same amount of applesauce in most cases but pick the cake carefully because apple does not necessarily enhance chocolate batter as much as a nice dense carrot cake.
- Aspartame: You can use this 1:1 in recipes for sugar but it is not an ideal choice for baked goods. This product loses sweetness when heated and will not brown.
- Brown Rice Syrup: This thick product can be used anywhere that honey or agave nectar is appropriate. Simple swap out the other ingredient in the same amounts if you want a different taste because all these are sugar substitutes.
- Coconut Sugar: This product can be substituted in equal amounts to regular sugar. It has a slightly different taste, like coconut, so do not use it unless you like that subtle flavor.
- Honey: Honey is nutritious and can stand alone in recipes that require sugar.
- Maple Syrup: Maple syrup is absolutely lovely in cakes and it provides flavor and a subtle sweetness. Most recipes do not only use maple syrup, so make sure you don’t just swap your sugar out for this fragrant liquid.
- Molasses: Most recipes do not use molasses alone as a sweetener because the darker products are not truly sweet. Molasses can be combined with other sugar substitutes to create a lovely cake especially spice cakes, gingerbread, and carrot cakes.
- Rapadura: this is a less available product that can be substituted 1:1 with sugar. It is basically unrefined sugar cane.
- Saccharin: This sweetener is not a perfect substitution for sugar but it does not break down when heated. Cakes that contain saccharin are light colored, slightly lumpy, and have no rise to them.
- Stevia: This natural product is about 200 times sweeter than regular sugar , so only use about 1 teaspoon per cup of sugar. This means you will have to bulk up the recipe with something else to make up for the lost sugar volume.
- Sucralose: Not ideal for baking and should not be used in cake decorating except to sweeten sauces or pastry cream. Cakes made with sucralose will not rise, do not have a lovely caramelized brown appearance, and will be tough.
source: about.com
