HEALTH WATCH

Lowdown on Low-Fat
Baking Tactics Help You halve your cake and eat it, too.

By Nancy Ross Ryan
SPECIAL TO THE TRIBUNE
May 10, 2000

"Stressed is desserts spelled backwards," says Joanne Murray, the technical manager of Food Marketing Support Services, in Oak Park, Ill., a 15-year-old research and development company for the domestic and international food industry. And during the holiday season, she says, stressed describes our struggle between the need to restrict calories and the desire to enjoy one of the best parts of Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa: festive baked goods. Most traditional favorites -- cookies, brownies, layer cakes, cheesecakes, and sweet breakfast pastries -- are high in calories from fat and sugar. But fat, unless it is a vegetable oil, is usually saturated fat and, if it is butter, high in cholesterol.

But there is a way to have your cake and eat it, too, if you make your holiday favorites by low-fat baking. "However, one of the big problems with most commercial low-fat baked goods is that they are very high in sugar," warns Jane Davis, a food consultant and product developer who for 15 years owned Ganache Bakery in Evanston. "Fat is a carrier of flavor that helps tenderize and hold in moisture in baked goods." So her recommendation is to cut not all the fat from baking but some of the fat, which significantly reduces calories, and to be careful not to increase the sugar to over-compensate. Her signature recipe for Pumpkin Low-Fat Low-Sugar Cheesecake is a good example of how to halve the calories and fat while keeping flavor and texture.

One of the techniques for preserving great taste in low-fat baked goods is to double up on flavor, says Davis. "If you increase and emphasize the dominant flavor you compensate for the loss of fat," she explains. For example, if you are making a low-fat version of pumpkin tea bread, pumpkin muffins, pumpkin pie, then increase the pumpkin pie spices that everyone identifies as the traditional flavor profile. If you are making a low-fat apple cake, tart, muffins or bread, then emphasize the flavor with apple butter, apple sauce, fresh and/or dried apples and add cinnamon, the spice most associated with baked apple goods. A lemon cake, quick bread or muffins? Use lemon juice, lemon zest and/or a drop of lemon oil in the batter, and ice with a lemonade glaze. The same principle applies to orange-flavored baked goods, she counsels.

Nancy Rodriguez, president of Food Marketing, agrees that "those flavor cues are important. Just substituting fat with prune puree alone in brownies, for example, doesn't deliver the expected chocolate flavor." But a reduced fat brownie recipe developed by one of her staff research scientists, Maria Caponigri, compensates deliciously by thinly icing the brownies (made with cocoĦa instead of solid chocolate and prune puree instead of butter) with the real thing: semisweet chocolate glaze.

A guideline for reducing fat in favorite traditional baking recipes, says Karen Trumbull, Food Marketing's creative manager, is to start by cutting one-fourth to one-third of the fat from the recipe and replacing it with fat substitutes. "Baking involves a lot of science, and you may want to experiment first on yourself or your family." (For tried-and-tested low-fat baking recipes, see "Suggested Reading," list at the end of this feature.)

A storage tip for preserving the moisture and texture of low-fat baked goods, if they are not going to be consumed in a few hours, is to wrap them well. Rodriguez cautions, "All plastic wraps do not perform equally. Look for one that claims to keep moisture in."

And moderation is the key to reducing calories in consumption. "Home is the only place where you get to control the size of the dessert portion, and moderation is the key," says Trumbull.

In addition, some desserts are naturally low in fat and would make a nice addition to the holiday sweet table. For example, butter less sponge cakes, angel food cake (vanilla and chocolate), meringues (vanilla, chocolate, peppermint), and old-fashioned steamed Boston Brown Bread.

Last but not least, garnish creatively. "The illusion of grandeur can go a long way to enhance the perception and pleasure of a low-fat dessert," Trumbull says. For example, garnish cheesecakes with fresh mint, fresh fruit and drizzle with fruit purees. Spoon two different fruit purees -- strawberry and peach -- on opposite sides of a dessert plate, creating a yin-yang design. Then place cake or fruitcake in the center. Or make a tasting plate by serving thin slices of three low-fat desserts on one plate.