You CAN have your cake and eat it

I’m caught up in the midst of a little flurry of simultaneous blogging at the moment. First there was the one about the old primary school connection. And now, I am simultaneously posting with my old china Pig in the Kitchen.

Pig’s blog is so multi-faceted. No, no, no. Not multi-fauceted, like American bathrooms. Multi-faceted. She’s a mummy blogger, an expat blogger, AND a recipes-for-food-allergies blogger. I just can’t pigeon-hole her at all. One thing that really endears her to me is this. She once said she was giving up blogging, and then just couldn’t keep away, and came back. I did that too, a long time ago. It was nice to find a kindred feeble-willed blogging-addict. She also confessed to sharing my crush on Anthony Wiggle (but not in public; sorry, Pig, to out you on that one).

I use Pig as my personal cooking and baking advice guru. I once emailed her to say “why do my biscuits always burn on the bottom? If I take them out before they’re burnt, they’re not done. If I leave them till they’re done, then they burn. How do I find that nano-second in between underdone and burnt? Is it the baking trays? Should I bother to line them with baking parchment? Do I need to get the light inside my oven mended? How would I do that? Where would I buy a light bulb? Can I fit it myself? Could I then see the biscuits, or would I also have to clean the inside of the oven door? Do you know how much I hate cleaning the oven? What am I going to do with the rest of my life when my preschooler starts full-time school? Should we have invested our English money in an instant access account before we came here? Is there justice in this life?”

She emailed back “Do you put your biscuits on the bottom shelf? I always think the bottom shelf of the oven is a bad place to be if you’re a biscuit. Try the top shelf.”

Biscuits in this household, since that day, have her to thank for their pale undersides. She is a whizz at all things culinary.

After my cancer diagnosis and treatment, I have been trying to do as much with my diet as possible to prevent any stray cancer cells making a nest and settling down. There’s evidence that you can do a lot to help yourself, and of course this is good for morale if nothing else. Much better to feel you are doing something, than to feel you are sitting waiting for some cosmic dice to roll, and to find out which side of the statistics you fell on. What I’ve done is the subject of another blog post, but the bit where Pig comes in concerns sugar. As far as my research tells me (and when I say "my research", what I mean is the half dozen books that Husband has read on the subject, and distilled into nuggets of practical wisdom for me), cancer cells thrive on sugar. I hope I’m not wrong when I say that there is one scan that you can have to detect a tumour, which simply looks for areas of high sugar concentration in your body (please correct me, if you know about these things). We all know that the Western diet contains ridiculous amounts of sugar, and that the human body wasn’t designed for that, so one of my aims has been to cut out the stuff. And even if it’s a total red herring on the cancer front, we all know it makes sense for so many other reasons.

I’m pleased to say that after a few months of cutting down (not quite cutting out) sugar, I don’t really miss it much. I don’t lie awake at night yearning for doughnuts, or have to avoid the bakery aisle in Dillons. I get my fix when needed from a hugely increased consumption of dark chocolate, which has a bit of sugar in it, but also has anti-carcinogenic properties (and if it doesn’t, please don’t correct me). But just occasionally, I do think “hm, a great big, stodgy mouthful of something spongy and sweet would be very nice at this point”. Plus, my kids are still in the I-don’t-call-it-a-snack-unless-it’s-sweet mode of operation. So I asked Pig if she had any recipes for a low sugar, or even a no sugar, cake.

She said she didn’t have one to hand, but muttered something about "enjoying a challenge in the kitchen". And voila! Here is the result. I’ve tried it, and I love it. (Can’t quite say the same for the children – they can sniff out healthy food at 100 yards and take the necessary evasive action.) It’s fruity, sweet, delicious, and fills you up. It provides that "sink my teeth" moment. You should try it. And simultaneous blogging. Both are fun, and both are non-fattening.

Thank you, Pig. The recipe is fab (and I'm going to try your healthy Beetroot buns too). It’s lovely that you are concerned enough about me to spend time creating my very own recipe. I mean, how many people have a cake named after them? And please don’t try and leave blogging again, (not soon, anyway).

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