Low-fat fruity teacake – BBC Good Food

After last week’s breakfast bars I wanted to continue on with a slightly healthier approach to baking, for a while at least. I came across this recipe for a fruity teacake which was not only loaded with lots of fruit, but also promised to be low in fat, in an old issue of BBC Good Food. I was sold.

This is a Saturday Baking Challenge that probably needs to be started on a Friday for best results as the dried fruits need to soak in the tea for a few hours or overnight.

Yes that’s right, this is a teacake that uses actual tea, a bit of a fun novelty for me as I’d not come across this before. This cake was super simple to make, and, aside from the overnight soaking can be whipped up in minutes to cook in the oven for an hour releasing a delicious smell throughout your kitchen.

Using only 50g of butter and 100g of light brown sugar compared with its 300g of fruit, this is a refreshing make as it doesn’t make your arteries swell at the mere sight of the ingredients in your bowl.

Luckily as well, the cake tastes so lovely that you might never know it was low fat. The only place where this falls down is the texture. Perhaps because of the lack of fat to hold it together, this will crumble almost as soon as its touched. But when something tastes this good and offers a low-calorie treat, who cares?

Difficulty level: 1/5 If you can’t mix together flour, butter and fruit then you probably should leave the baking to someone else…

Recipe amendments: I could only find a fairly expensive 100g pack of dried berries, so I made up the remaining 200g with sultanas. You could use any dried fruit you have to hand for variation. To make this even healthier, you could skimp or even miss out altogether the demerara sugar topping.

Taste: 3/5 Ok, it’s nowhere near as good as Nigella’s Chocolate Pudding Cake, obviously, but then it is about one billion times better for you. Still a tasty treat for afternoon tea.

Chance of remake: 3/5 If I can figure out how to keep the low fat element but make a more cohesive cake I’ll be giving this one a go again, as well as trying out different dried fruits.

You can find this week’s fruity tea cake recipe on the BBC Good Food website. See below for a couple more pictures.

The structural integrity of this cake is at best mediocre:

But look at the lovely texture of the fruit and demerara sugar topping: