Hi, foodies in the Hive!

I hope you're all doing great. Two weeks more and it's February already, so I'd better make peaces with January now, huh? Soon it'll be too late 😁

I'm still in a festive mood, so when my father told me he missed a good piece of homemade cake, I said, "Wait no more!" Hehe. I made a fruit & chocolate cake he loves, but when it's for him I use half the sugar and do a couple of tricks to make it taste sweeter than it really is. I'll show you.

I'm not a fan of sweeteners; in fact, I strongly avoid them--because of the uncertainty of their incidence in Alzheimer's disease, among other things--. So I prefer to use sugar--which will at least allow me to be lucid when it finally kills me 🙈--. Summing up, I prefer to use little or no sugar. And this is my principle when I'm making snacks for my father.

I told you I did a couple of tricks. Well, this is what I do about cakes so you don't notice they are actually less sweet.

Use a mix of tangy and sweet fruits.

The tangy flavor will make your tongue appreciate more the sweetness of the rest of the ingredients even when they are not that sweet.

Use little flour.

Instead of using a lot of flour, add bitter chocolate chunks and nuts--and more fruit? Yes, sure!

Add yogurt and add more egg to the batter. If you have seeds, those are good too! The idea is having a rich piece of cake that tastes sweet and it's healthier even when it has sugar and wheat flour that will turn into more sugar.

Ingredients

1/3 cup sugar
50 gr margarine
100 gr yogurt
1 1/2 cup self rising wheat flour
1/2 cup egg (2 M or L eggs)
3/4 cup peeled and chopped granny Smith
3/4 cup raisins
3/4 bitter chocolate chunks
1/4 cup freshly squeezed orange juice
2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice
2 tablespoons cane honey
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
1 tablespoon vanilla essence
1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
&
more margarine to grease the baking pan--2 tablespoons will do :)

Light lemon glaze, lemon zest, and nuts for garnish:

1/2 cup confectioner's sugar
2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice
crushed and roasted walnut and pistachio

Let's Get to Work!

This bundt cake doesn't stick to the pan, has a soft and slightly crunchy crumb on the outside, tastes quite sweet without being too sweet, and has so many flavors and textures inside and out that no one will get bored with it. Neither they'll forget that time when you offered it to them with a cup of hot coffee or tea. Promise.

I start by peeling the apple and cut it into small pieces of about 2 centimeters. They should not be small; you should be able to feel them in your mouth and chew them to extract all their tangy, fragrant flavor.

I also wash the orange and lemon to extract their juice, to which I add the can honey and in which I soak the apple pieces + the raisins. This fine layer of tangy and sweet is really important so the tip of our tongue feels all the sweetness.

And, of course, there must be a little salt to make it interesting. A little salt helps to enhance the sweetness. My Chemistry teacher back in school was great, but she didn't teach me that 🐒

Once the apple and raisins are soaking, I prepare the cake batter, which is super easy.

To make this cake, you'll only need a bowl and a pastry spoon. I used my silicone pastry spoon.

In a bowl, I add the margarine and sugar and mix until it becomes creamy. Immediately, I add the eggs and yogurt. I beat very well, until the mixture is homogenized, which happens quickly.

At this point I also add the nutmeg, vanilla essence, and ground cinnamon. Then I mix so that the flavors are integrated.

Now it's time to add the flour. I sift it over the bowl.

And add it in two parts, folding it with the spoon.

The batter is sticky and heavy. It will turn more fluid when I add the fruit & juice.

BUT before adding the soaked fruit & juice, be sure to turn on your oven to preheat it to 280 degrees F. In the meantime, finish mixing the ingredients and grease the pan with enough margarine.

I like to use enough margarine so I don't have to cover the margarine with flour--or spend my little money on baking paper 😂

This is what the batter looks like before going into the oven.

After 1 hour in my little electric oven (at 280 degrees F), this is what the cake looks like.

Top

And bottom

It comes out smoothly.

To achieve this neat result without having to cover the chunks in flour, it's important to have the oven preheated and put the cake in the oven as soon as the batter is poured into the pan.

After the cake has cooled, 20 minutes later, we can decorate it.

Time to finish!

As I've said many times before, decorating is not my best skill. So I put all my hopes in the decoration ingredients being pretty in themselves, haha. Nuts are very pretty and that's why I made a nice golden nut wreath for my cake using walnuts and pistachios and a light lemon glaze to help them stick to the cake's surface.

To make the glaze, I used half a cup of confectioner's sugar I had in the fridge and the juice of a small lemon from our tree.