Rainy afternoons are for Cake making

 It was one of those days again, when the rain does not stop and the girls get fed up with being cooped up inside all day.  Its moments like those that are perfected for cake making. There is plenty of time to make, eat, enjoy the cake and of course clean up the mess.  So the girls and I made cup cakes.   

I used one of Nigella's cupcake recipes but I didn't have enough sugar so I used some Stevia as well. Stevia is a natural sweetener extract from a plant called Stevia Rebaudiana Bertoni. It is a little bush that grows in Brazil and has been used as a sweetener for the past 400 years.  It is much healthier then Sugar and all other food sweeteners, but for some reason it was illegal in Europe until 1 month ago and still is in the USA. Now it is available to buy in most health food shops.  The only problem with stevia is that it is about 300% sweeter then sugar and only a very small amount is needed.  This means that when using it for cake making it is hard to work out the corrected proportions.  So using stevia is a little bit experimental for now.  
Nigella's recipe says to use 125g of sugar but I only had 50g so I added 10 drops of liquid stevia and added more flour to make up the bulk.  The cakes were not very sweet but I like that.  Here is the recipe I came up with.

Ingredients:
150g butter
50g sugar
10-15 drops of Liquid Stevia
175g self-raising Flour (I added 50g more then the recipe said, to make up for the lack of sugar)
1 tsp of baking powder
2 eegs
2-3 tbsp of milk
1/2 tsp vanilla 
50g dark chocolate chips


I melted the butter and mixed in the sugar, then the girls added all the other ingredients and mixed everything together. They put the mixture in to cupcake cases in a muffin tray and we baked them for about 20 minutes in the oven.   

Then there was the very inportent job of cleaning the spoons.  

                 Little fingers could not wait for them to cool down.  

They covered the cakes and themselves with chocolate icing and sweets. 

Then it was time for tasting.  They were very delicious.  

Hopefully someone, someday will publish a stevia cookbook, but until then its down to experimentation.