Monday, March 10, 2014

I am eating candy for breakfast

Sorry, nothing cool and awesome here.  I'm at work, didn't feel like going out to get breakfast back here and decided to stay in and clean up my office.  What have I to eat that is around here?  Candy and left-over birthday cake from my son's birthday party.  Sounds good to me, right?  But what about cake?  Is it really that bad for you?



Here is the thing though, compared to other things that people are marketing to adults and children as breakfast items, I think chocolate cake is in fact more healthy.  I make chocolate cake with whole grain, unbleached flour, leavening agents, kosher salt, cocoa powder, eggs, milk, vanilla extract, oil and cane sugar.  The whole grain unbleached white flour has more Omega acids in it and fiber and nutrients than the white bleached flour, so it is better for you.  Just about anything you find out there has other kinds of flour like "unbleached enriched white flour", which is a technical name for taking the lowest quality of flour and adding nutrients to it to make it at least a decent flour.  So, the cake is better.  What about oils?  Most fast food or pre-packaged baked goods contain oils to use as the fat in their recipe.  Hostess, for example, explains in the ingredient list that the oil may contain any of the following types of oil: soy, cottonseed, canola or beef fat.  Really?  Did it really say Beef Fat?  Yep.  Which is better?  Anyway, enough knit picking, what about things like sugar?  A good chocolate cake recipe has about 2 cups of sugar and while that seems to be a lot of sugar, let's look at how it breaks down:  the recipe I am looking at, makes 2- 9 inch round cakes. http://allrecipes.com/recipe/one-bowl-chocolate-cake-iii/

Sure, if you put them on top of each other, it makes it thicker and more cakeyer, which makes it about 10-12 servings.  2 cups divided by 12 comes to about 2.6 tablespoons of sugar per slice.  That is about 30 grams of sugar.  That 30 grams of sugar is comparable to the sugar found in most fruit drinks for children.  Most of the large Cliff Bars have about 30 grams of sugar in them.  I like to focus on sugar, because it has the most calories and has the most negative effects.  At the golden arches, the bacon, egg and cheese mcgriddle has  has 15 grams of sugar and a large 190 calories from fat.  It weighs 6.1 ounces.  A 6.1 oz slice of the chocolate cake would be larger than a normal average slice.  Also, in a cake that large, if we look at the amount of fat in it, the 1/2 cup of oil in a chocolate cake is not as bad as the oils found in mcdonalds items. Back to sugar, this cake has no corn syrup, much less high fructose corn syrup and it doesn't have any questionable items like beef fat or lard.  It is a simple chocolate cake.  Which makes me wonder if Mr. Cosby was onto something. 
     

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