Many times I have been worried about
getting a nutritious and balanced meal when I could not cook. Whether
you are in a small hotel, on a day-long ride, in a remote area,
worried about the quality or the hygiene of food or simply too busy,
it can be hard to feed your body and mind.
This is why I developed this cake
recipe. I call these muffin-shaped cakes “sport cakes” because
they taste great, are easy to digest, and are well balanced from a
nutritional point of view (half of calories from carbohydrates, one third from lipids and the rest from proteins). For a
complete meal you can have them with fruits (like apples which are
easy to carry around). The following recipe makes lemon and poppy
seeds cakes. You can vary the sugar (light brown, muscovado, honey,
etc.), the flour (rye, oat, but I did not try rice or maize starch so
the result is not guaranteed, drop me an email if you want me to
design such a recipe) and flavours (orange, cinnamon, nutmeg, nigella
seeds etc.) for original cakes. This recipe provides roughly 1000
kilocalories (kcal).
Another advantage of this recipe is
that it takes 10 minutes to make and 5 minutes too cook in the
microwave! So it's a good time and energy saver (it would take 3
times as much energy to cook these cakes in the standard oven because
of preheat time and longer cooking time, because microwaves directly
heat the water in the ingredients).
Ingredients:
130 g plain flour
2.5 g baking powder (one level teaspoon)
50 g almond powder
20 g caster sugar (two level
tablespoons)
2 medium eggs
20 g skimmed milk powder dissolved in
110 g water
2 tablespoons poppy seeds
zest of two lemons (or two teaspoons of
natural lemon flavour)
I use milk powder because providing the
same amount of nutrients with milk would add too much water and
slightly deplete the cake with proteins (skimmed milk powder is approximately proteins,
carbohydrates and minerals) but you can definitely use the milk of
your taste. The amount of sugar is voluntarily low to keep the
glycemic index of the recipe low but you could use up to 40 g of
sugar with roughly the same nutritional balance, if it suits your
taste better.
Step 1: Mix the milk powder with the
water and stir well to dissolve.
Step 2: Separate the egg whites from
the yolks: put the whites in a large bowl and the yolks in the milk
(stir well to incorporate the yolks into the milk).
Step 2: Sift the flour and baking
powder together (they may contain lumps), put the almond powder and
poppy seeds in, mix.
Step 3: Whisk the egg whites with the
sugar until very stiff, to make a kind of meringue. Spread the zest
or aroma over the meringue, then slowly add the milk and homogenize
by whisking more slowly. Do not whisk too much at this time to retain
the air you put in the whites.
Step 4: Spread the flour over the
meringue and gently homogenize with a large tablespoon (as if you
were making chocolate mousse). A large tablespoon will work quicker
and retain a light texture.
Step 5: Poor the mix in small ramekins
(this recipe fills four 8 cm wide and 4 cm deep ramekins) and cook 5
minutes at 800 watts, opening the door a few seconds after 3 minutes
to let the steam escape. If cooking two cakes at a time, cook for 3
minutes only. Small ramekins work best, a larger dish will not
preserve the fluffiness of the cakes. I my experience there is no
need to grease the ramekins but a fine layer of oil would not do
harm. Remove the cakes from the ramekins immediately after cooking by gently detaching
the edges and flipping the ramekin upside down (use oven gloves to
hold the ramekin). Let the cakes cool for 5 minutes and wrap them in
cling film or aluminium foil to retain the moisture.
Due to the low amount of fat (compared
to a more traditional recipe), these cakes can become quite firm.
This is because the molecular structure of starch changes during
cooling, a processus called retrogradation and inhibited by fat. The effect is easily
reversed by warming the cakes a bit, for example 10 seconds in a
microwave oven (just like bread becomes very soft in a microwave).
Enjoy your sport cakes!
