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Sugar-free baking is expensive, but buying a store bought cake mix, like this Betty Crocker Sugar-Free Chocolate Cake, makes it more affordable.
You can pick the Betty Crocker sugar-free cake mix up for £3 at Tesco, which is a bargain when you think that a 500g bag of a refined-sugar alternative costs more than that on its own. You’ll need to buy eggs, regardless if you’re using a mix or making your own, so we didn’t include these in the cost comparison.
Read on to find out how we got on making the Betty Crocker Sugar-Free Chocolate Cake, as well as what our small army of diabetic and non-diabetic taste-testers thought of it.
Ingredients
Much like making a cake from scratch, you’ll need eggs. The rest? Already in the Better Crocker cake mix. You’ll need to supply the wet ingredients, of course, the Better Crocker box is a dry-only zone.
When it comes to replacing the refined sugar, Betty Crocker uses maltitol, a sweetener with a lower glycemic index than white sugar. It’s also used as a laxative, so keep that in mind before you scran the whole cake. Maltitol also contains far less calories than sugar, at 2.1 calories per gram.
Method
You’ll need:
- Mixing bowl
- Whisk/stand mixer
- Jug/bowl
- Cake tin
- Parchment paper
- The ingredients listed on the box (water, three eggs, vegetable oil)
Tip the chocolate cake mix into a mixing bowl, and in a separate jug, whisk together the water, eggs, and vegetable oil. Preheat the oven to 180C.
Slowly combine the wet ingredients with the cake mix, whisking until smooth. We found that the mix was on the thick side and was hard to whisk, so we decided to add an extra splash of water to loosen it slightly.
Be careful not to overmix the cake batter as you’ll knock all of the air out and end up with a flat, dense sponge.
Baking
As we didn’t have any baking parchment to line the cake tin, we brushed a combination of melted butter and flour around the tin instead.
Betty Crocker’s back-of-the-box instructions said to bake at 180C for 34-38 minutes, exactly the same as the sugar-free vanilla cake mix. In our electric oven, our total bake time was a longer 40 minutes. At 30 minutes, we checked on it’s progress and, as our knife returned wet batter, we put it straight back in the oven. While not as wet, our 35 minute check indicated a few more minutes would be needed.
A clean knife was returned at the 40-minute mark. As you can see from the video below, the top of the cake was soft to the touch and bounced back to shape quickly.
Removing it from the tin was painless, aided by our tin having a removable bottom.
Would we make the Betty Crocker Sugar-Free Chocolate Cake again?
Yes. Yes, we would. The sponge was light and soft. The chocolatey smell when baking didn’t translate to a chocolatey flavour, however you could easily solve this with some chocolate icing or buttercream. (Much like the picture on the box suggests.) If you’re after an easy to bake cake mix, Betty Crocker’s Sugar-Free Vanilla Cake is the one you want – every person who tried that commented on how “strong” the flavour was.
The diabetic taste testers loved it; chocolate cravings were definitely satisfied. I happily polished off two thick slices in one sitting. One diabetic tester noted that the Betty Crocker cake wasn’t overly sweet, but didn’t comment on any aftertaste: see below.
The non-diabetic taste testers detected a slight aftertaste of sweeteners, but it wasn’t off-putting enough to turn down seconds. Served with a dollop of cream or a scoop of ice cream, that artificial aftertaste was unnoticeable. However, in a blind taste test, the big “that was sugar-free” reveal was met with surprise, as most of the time, it’s incredibly easy to tell when store bought bakes are sugar-free. (Not dissimilar to eating cardboard soaked in sand.)
Our teenage taste tester said, “it’s got a nice feel”, referring to how it felt in his mouth.
All testers reported that the Betty Crocker cake had a cool feel to it, even at room temperature. After a bit of research, the cool feeling was caused by the maltitol, which does produce a “cooling sensation”.
It’s near impossible to find bake-at-home sugar-free cake mixes that use whole food sugar alternatives rather than sweeteners. If you’re really against sweeteners, then you’ll have to go full homemade. Our coconut sugar chocolate brownies are a good place to start.
Two days after baking, the sponge was still light and soft; there wasn’t even a hit of dryness on the cut edges. Perhaps due to the cake being stored in tightly wrapped tin foil, perhaps not. Either way, we were impressed.
