When you are trying to eat healthy food and lose weight, you can sometimes feel as though you’ve got food on your mind more often than not.
And the brain is a funny thing, because although you may be feeling really good and enjoying the new healthy food – your brain might still be shouting ‘I want cake! I want cake!’ when you walk past a bakery.
So what to do? You probably can’t avoid walking past a bakery forever (plus they seem to have cake everywhere now, even in the supermarket).
When the cravings strike, you can fight back – by cooking up one of our 5 healthy options.
This is not a recommendation to eat cake every afternoon. Even healthy cakes like ours still have calories that need to be accounted for.
But if you really fancy a baked goodie, you can have some cake as a special treat – and here are our absolute faves.
Healthy Carrot Cake Muffins (170 cal/muffin)
Healthy Carrot Cake MuffinsYou might feel as though we mention these muffins a lot but there is a good reason for that. They are sensational.
They contain no added sugar, and no sweeteners. This is pretty much unheard of in muffin circles.
The sweetness comes from the natural sugars in the banana and dates, which also add a delicious moistness to the cake.
We love to bake a double batch and then, once they’ve gone cold, wrap them individually and freeze them. Then just take them out of the freezer the night before you want to eat them, or pop in the microwave for an almost instant cake hit.
A typical piece of carrot cake is around 335 calories per 100g serve. Compare that to our healthy muffins which are just 170 calories each and you can see why we love them.
Coffee and Date Slice (112 cal/serve)
Coffee and Date SliceJust 4 ingredients is all you need to prepare this moorish cake.
At just 112 calories per serve, you can indulge almost guilt free.
Once again, no sugar is a big plus here. The dates add the sweetness while the nuts provide the crunch.
It just goes to show that cakes and slices don’t need to be complicated to be delicious.
Wholegrain Banana Bread (210 cal/serve)
Wholegrain Banana BreadBanana bread is a funny one. For some reason because it’s not called banana cake people seem to think that it is healthy.
Traditional banana bread has a heck of a lot of butter and sugar in it and doesn’t really give a lot back in the nutrition department.
That’s why we love our wholegrain version. Not only does it get it sweetness from banana and honey (not a grain of sugar in sight) it also uses olive oil instead of butter for the (minimal) fat content.
And unlike the usual recipe for banana bread, this recipe uses wholegrain flour (tick), the nutty goodness of LSA (tick), and some heart-healthy coconut flakes too (tick tick).
At 210 calories per slice (depending how thickly you slice it) this isn’t an everyday treat by any means. But when you compare it to a 128g slice from Muffin Break which packs in 407 calories – you can see why it’s a better choice.
Delicious and Nutritious Chocolate Cake (151 cal/serve)
Delicious and Nutritious You might think we’ve lost our minds when we tell you to put zucchini and beetroot puree into your mixing bowl for this recipe – but it is so good!
The healthy veggies make the cake super moist (as well as nutritious) and also bring down the oil needed for this cake to one teaspoon.
Not bad when a typical chocolate cake would ask you to throw in around 200g of butter.
