Preheat the oven!

I love baking and used to have my own little cupcake business before work got too busy and I became head of my department.  I adore desserts and definitely have 'regular' cake when I fancy some, though only as a treat.

To keep my sweet tooth at bay though, I have been following some recipes to bake sugar free cakes from my Hemsley Hemsley ‘The Art of Eating Well’ book.  My firm favourites are their lemon muffins and banana loaf.  I tend to cook these recipes on a weekend and then there’s a good stash of either loaf or  muffins to last me through the week- they are ideal for a dessert or mid-morning snack.  I’ve also really got into pastry free quiches too- a work colleague made one using a Slimming World recipe, but I adapted a recipe from BBC Good Food instead.  This is a really good lunch- full of protein and tasty!

Lemon Muffins:

Ingredients (some slightly different to the original recipe):

65g butter (or butter based spread)

1tbsp lemon juice (either freshly squeezed of from a bottle)

3 eggs

5 tbsp maple syrup

1tbsp poppy seeds

¼ tsp bicarbonate of soda

2 pinches of turmeric

45g coconut flour

A pinch of sea salt

Method:

1.   Preheat the oven to 170 degrees and line a muffin tin with paper cases- I tend to do about 8 muffins from this recipe.

2.        Melt the butter, lemon juice and maple syrup in a pan, but don’t overheat it!  Once melted, whisk in the eggs into the melted mixture, followed by the remaining ingredients.

3.        Pour the mixture from the pan into a measuring jug and fill your cases. Bake in the oven for around 20 mins- when the tops are springy to the touch or a skewer poked into the centre of a cake comes away clean, you know they’re done.  They keep well in an airtight container and are just lovely and buttery- much better than over sweet, sugary cupcakes.

Banana Loaf

Ingredients:

300g ripe bananas, mashed

30g unsalted butter

2 tbsp maple syrup (add more if you wish, though the ripe bananas will be pretty sweet!)

1 tsp ground cinnamon

1tsp vanilla extract (or vanilla essence)

3 eggs

½ tsp bicarbonate of soda

1tbsp lemon juice

220g ground almonds (now available in the baking section at Aldi, so cheap too!  In fact, pretty much all the ingredients for these cakes can be found in Aldi)

30g linseed

A pinch of sea salt

Method:

1.        Preheat the oven to 170 degrees and line a loaf tin with grease proof paper.

2.       Mash the bananas into a pulp then whisk in the maple syrup, cinnamon, vanilla, eggs, bicarbonate of soda, lemon juice and salt.

3.       Add the ground almonds and linseed and whisk again.  Pour into your tin and bake for about an hour, moving to a lower shelf of the oven if it looks as though the loaf is browning too quickly. Test in the same way as the muffins to see if it’s done.  Keeps well all week in an airtight container. One of my Instagram pics for you of the end result- feel free to follow me on there!

Pastry free quiche

Ingredients:

8 eggs

200ml milk (lactose free works fine, I assume skimmed milk would be ok too)

50g grated cheddar

175g of diced vegetables/ filling of your choice (peppers, onion, sweet corn, meats, ham, bacon- whatever you fancy but stick to the 175g of weight)

Salt and pepper

My Mexican version:

8 eggs

200ml milk (lactose free works fine, I assume skimmed milk would be ok too)

50g grated chilli cheese (Aldi)

175g of peppers and a few jalapeños (diced)

Salt and pepper

Method:

1.        Preheat the oven to 160 degrees.  Grease a Pyrex dish with butter and throw in your diced ingredients.

2.       Whisk your eggs and milk together until smooth, then stir your cheese and some salt and pepper into the mixture.  Pour into the dish with the veggies and bake in the oven for about half an hour or until golden.  To test it’s done, stick a skewer/ sharp knife into the centre of the quiche- if it comes away clean, it’s ready.  You can eat this hot or cold but I prefer it cold with salad (PS the soup maker was out whilst the quiche was in the oven- it's tomato and lentil soup today! Recipe to follow).

Totally yummy, real food with no refined sugar.  Big shout out to Hemsley Hemsley for their sugar free baking- their book is amazing and I’d highly recommend it.

My mission next is to perfect sugar free carrot cake muffins...I’m working on them! Happy eating everyone xxxx