Features: Magazine | Literary Review | Life | Metro Plus | Open Page | Education Plus | Book Review | Business | SciTech | Entertainment | Young World | Property Plus | Quest | Folio |

Cakes and calories

Post-festive season, one can take a reality check on cake consumption

He that will have a cake out of the wheat must tarry the grinding.

Have I not tarried?

Ay, the grinding; but you must tarry the bolting.

Have I not tarried?

Ay, the bolting; but you must tarry the leavening.

Still have I tarried.

Ay, to the leavening; but here's yet in the word 'hereafter' the kneading, the making of the cake, the heating of the oven, and the baking; nay, you must stay the cooling too, or you may chance to burn your lips."

History of Troilus and Cressida (William Shakespeare)

Neolithic man made the earliest cakes from crushed grains, moistened and cooked on hot stones. These resembled the grain biscuits of today. The earliest cakes were plain grainy flat cakes, not the multi-layered sweet cakes of today, because ovens were crude and baking was in its infancy. The Egyptians developed modern baking and their cakes were bread sweetened with honey.

The Greeks made their cakes with nuts and honey. Placenta was a Roman honeyed cheesecake with a pastry base: it was an offering in temples. Satura was a flat heavy cake made with barley, raisins, pine nuts, pomegranate seeds and sweet wine. Leavening with yeast made cakes fluffier from the time of the Barbarians until the 18th century. Egg batter replaced yeast in the 18th century and remains the leavening agent of choice today. Modern cakes contain flour, sugar, egg, butter or margarine, milk or water or fruit juice, flavours, and yeast or baking powder. "Vegetarian" cakes replace egg with gluten or starch. Icing on cakes is a mixture of fat, powdered sugar and flavouring extract.

Cakes are calorie-heavy: 100 gm of chocolate cake, for example, contains around 360 Calorie. Most of these calories are from fat and sugar, and nearly 1/4th of the calories are from saturated fat. But 100 gm of cake per day is not incompatible with an overall nutritious diet containing around 2000 Calorie. The trouble with this advice is that no one limits himself to a small 100 gm piece of cake.

Low-calorie cakes use artificial sweeteners and low fat substitutes. But artificial sweeteners do not take well to heating, and these cakes never really match up to the sinful real things.

RAJIV. M

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail