Pleasant surprise. You CAN bake acceptably with Splenda. I hadn't tried it yet, but when faced with a few bananas that were trending toward decrepit today and a fond wistfulness for my Kona Inn banana bread recipe, I knuckled down and tried it. First I calculated the carbohydrate grams in the recipe. I found out that with the flour, the bananas, the walnuts and the bits of Russell Stover sugar-free chocolate that I added (hey, I always put chocolate chips in my banana bread, no reason to give it up) there were 54 grams of carbs in a mini loaf from my small pans (6" x 3.5" x 2" deep). Diabetic diet translation: a little more grams of carbs than I'm allowed per meal, but I can forgo 1/3 of my carbs at dinner and have a little less than a third of a mini loaf as a quasi-dessert. That's about four bites. Oh well, it'll have to do.
(An aside: just leaving out the sugar didn't make the calories go away either. This stuff is crammed with them. See, sugar isn't your only enemy in the battle of the waistline. It's the only thing that is medically limited on my diet, but I also have to watch the calories and fat. And the bananas are wickedly caloric. We're not even going to talk about the 1/2 cup butter in the recipe.)
Off to the kitchen I went to mix up a batch and bake four mini loaves of banana nut/choc chip bread. And you know what? It wasn't bad. There was still that "Is that actually sweet?" thing that Splenda does with me. It's not like sugar-sweet, but your taste buds don't quite know what to do with it and provisionally categorize it as sweet. This is the only way I can describe what goes on when I taste Splenda. It's kind of weird.
But the banana bread loaves had the right texture and browned nicely, acting just like the regular recipe. They were moist and dense and quite acceptable. To back my up impression of the experiment, I asked husband if he wanted to try them. He replied that since he doesn't like Splenda and he doesn't like the Russell Stover sugar-free chocolates and he's not crazy about walnuts or banana bread either, his opinion probably wasn't needed.
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2 comments:
I love your husband's honesty!
I made rum cake & it has nuts on the top (sprinkled into the bundt before the batter) & he had something "odd" to say about the nuts. (Followed up with, "My mom cooked plain, so "adding" things seems like you are..."
He ate enough of it...
I have found Splenda to be SWEET, Sweet, sweet. At least there isn't, for me anyway, the horrible aftertaste that the other sweeteners have.
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