Case Study: Hulababy’s Sacher Torte / Chocolate Cake

Sacher Torte (Chocolate Cake) With Fruit Topping

Ingredients

For the cake:
6 free range organic eggs, separated

70ml cold pressed sunflower oil

170g cocoa solids

100g ground almonds and 60g soya flour

1 tsp baking powder

3 tbsp agave nectar

½ tsp sea salt

seeds of one vanilla pod

For the filling:
Apricot jam with no added sugar; for example, St. Dalfour Rhapsodie de Fruits

1 tbsp of lemon juice

For the icing:
120g cocoa solids

1½ tbsp of agave nectar

30g soya margarine

(1tbsp rum – optional)

To decorate:
24 toasted almond halves or lots of fruit for a more exotic look!

Method

Ingredient comparison as taken directly for various website recipes:

Now let’s look at the main ingredients in turn: eggs, fat, sugar, chocolate and flour and try to compare the ingredient amounts. I have tired to convert each items into compareable units.

Eggs – we always use free-range eggs because we care about the animal husbandry rather than for any nutritional benefit. As you will see, if you check out the nutritional information on eggs, these are not a health risk if one maintains a health low saturated fat diet – which of course is what all these recipes are about. In fact eggs do contain healthy polyunsaturated fats (omega-3 and omega-6).

All the recipes have eggs with the exception of Alternative Recipe 3 – however you will see that Alternative Recipe 3 has a very high sugar content instead. Alternative Recipe 1 uses 1 less egg but you will see that it is a slightly smaller cake recipe with much less flour. Alternative Recipe 2 uses significantly more eggs than Hulababy’s Sacher Torte.

Fat – this is a major topic. Full details can be found on the nutritional information page. Basically Hulababy’s philosphy is to replace all saturated fats with their more healthy unsaturated cousins. Generally for cake recipes this means replacing the butter (high in saturated fat and cholesterol) with a polyunsaturated oil; and for cookie or biscuit recipes (where the dough needs to be more firm since you generally kneed it with your hands) replacing the butter or margerine with soya margerine. We use soya margerine because it is dairy and gluten free and we don’t otherwise get enough soya intake but you could use a quality olive oil spread instead.

So you can see that Alternative Recipe 1 has the same amount of fat as Hulababy’s Sacher Torte but it uses butter which is high in saturated fat (the “bad” type of fat). Alternative Recipe 2 uses far more fat and again it is butter. Alternative Recipe 3 uses a compareable amount of oil which is a better replacement for the butter but doesn’t specify to use a quality oil that is low in saturated fat. For example, coconut and palm oils are highly saturated vegetable oils. The use of apple puree in the recipe can be a good alternative to oil BUT as this might well be a shop bought puree rather than one produced at home from scratch it might well have a high sugar content. Be sure to check the label.

Sugar – the sugar gives us the sweet flavour that we’ve become used to but once consumed our bodies naturally convert sugar into fat. We always try to use agave nectar in recipes as this gives a slower release of energy than refined sugar thanks to its low GI (Glycaemic Index) content.

3 tbsp of agave nectar is about 140g of which 91g is sugar content (from the nutritional info on the food label). If we allow for the extra agave nectar in the icing  Hulababy’s Sacher Torte recipe still comes in streaks ahead of all the other recipes, even Alternative Recipe 3 which although is a bigger cake (about 50% bigger based on flour content) has the supposed label of “healthy”!

Here’s how I worked that out: Total sugar equivalent for Hulababy’s Sacher Torte is 91g. If the Sacher Torte was 50% bigger then the total sugar content would be 136g which is still a lot less than the 250g in the Alternative Recipe 3.

Chocolate – although the amount of chocolate in Hulababy’s Sacher Torte may seem high against Alternative Recipe 1 remember that Alternative Recipe 1 is a smaller cake. Also remember the amount of sugar used in Alternative Receipe 3. We 100% cocoa solids (or if you must – the best organic dark (unsweetened) chocolate you can find with a high % content of cocoa). Cocoa and organic chocolate means that it contains no trans fats.

Flour – we always try to replace the content of the white processed flour with wholegrain varieties and often replace with or mix in non-gluten alternatives such as soya flour, which as the name suggests, is not a wheat flour.

Summary

Overall I hope you can see that Hulababy’s Sacher Torte recipe has used only the best ingredients and reduced the amounts of sugar and saturated fats compared to the other recipes. However you will find it is still a great tasting cake that you can truly be proud of baking and more importantly ENJOY eating afterwards.