Tag Archives: FreshlyBaked

Freshly baked happens in homes and sometimes bakeries. Freshly baked goods are not shelf stable so most breads and pastries sold off the shelf are packaged and preserved to extend shelf life.

🔴Carrot Cake – Mothers Day 2025

This Whole Foods Carrot Cake was our dessert last Sunday. Excellent dinner – halibut, rice pilaf, broccoli florets. My son-in-law grilled the brocolli florets and they came to the table ever so lightly charred. He pan fried the halibut and served it with a herb infused butter / olive oil sauce. He did cheat a little and used a package for the rice pilaf.

A moderate well balanced meal followed by a significant indulgence. But that’s what happens on Mother’s Day. The day was memorable for both food and company – perfect, beautiful, delicious, enjoyable. Everything a good Mother’s Day should be.

I’ll share with you upfront, the cake was tasty. Whole Foods does have problems and I rarely shop there these days, but when it comes to cheese or pastry, they do a credible job. The cake was not too sweet. It didn’t upset my stomach. And my gut did not complain. Since dinner was both good very satisfying, we all had moderate pieces. I didn’t give the cake a second thought as to its status until I found the box when I was cleaning up. A list of ingredients and a nutrition facts label. Okay I said to my self. Let’s take a look.

And that’s when I focused on the list of ingredients. OMG! After deciding the list was too long to count, I highlighted in yellow all the possible candidates that could serve as markers of ultra-processed. The two processes that stand out to me are natural flavors and multiple flavor extractions – cosmetic additives with the flavor notes suggesting Food 2.0.  The cake gets a red dot.

How would the taste compare with freshly baked? My guess is made from scratch and freshly baked would taste cleaner, sharper, and probably better. No less indulgent however. But I’ve never made a carrot cake so I can’t reference my own experience.

The Food Police insists that #UPF is not a reliable indicator of whether or not a food is healthy. On that point, I’m sure all can agree. Plenty of taste and not much else. So it really doesn’t matter whether you are nutrient focused or processing focused. Carrot cake is not a healthy choice!

Now I’ll just say Happy belated Mother’s Day to all the moms and grand moms out there. Here’s hoping your Mother’s Day was as perfect as mine was.

🟢 Turkish Yogurt Cake. Tasty. Tart. Sweet.

Here’s a picture of the yogurt cake I baked to celebrate the first day of Spring last year. The recipe comes from a beautiful book of Mediterranean recipes by Claudia Roden. The flavor profile balances tartness from lemon and yogurt against sweetness from cane sugar. This cake doesn’t fit the usual American profile for sweetness despite what looks to be a lot of sugar on the Nutrition Label. And based on the reaction of my guests, it’s okay as a dessert but as my daughter put it “It’s just not a real dessert Mom”.

The recipe is made with a squeaky clean list of ingredients – plain whole milk Greek yogurt, eggs, turbinado sugar, lemon juice, wheat flour, lemon zest. Quality ingredients don’t count for much these days because the primary focus is nutrients or food groups as carriers for nutrient dense composition. Our friendly food police dismisses the yogurt I use on the basis of too many grams of saturated fat. And they dismiss the sweetener on the basis of too many grams of added sugar. So it’s not surprising that food focused people like me have a hard time communicating with nutrient focused food scientists and dietitians who do the research and write the labels.

I always like to make the case that moderation is preferable to excess. But given the austere nutrient focused approach to sugar and “unhealthy” fat recommended by our dietary guidelines, moderation is no healthier than excess. This logic puts both my daughter’s ultra sweet “real dessert” and my yogurt cake with a balance between tart and sweet in the same not-healthy bucket.

VIEW FROM MY KITCHEN WINDOW

I’m thinking it’s time to redefine healthy and I’m going to start with a couple of common sense observations.

• Food counts. Whole, intact, real, natural, substantial, seasonal, regional, minimally processed, freshly prepared …

• Nutrients count. Cellular nutrients are the nutrient still intact within the cell structure of the food as opposed to nutrients that have been extracted or isolated or manufactured.

• Tradition counts. The yogurt cake honors a traditional eastern Mediterranean formulation. The recipe grew out of a culture that has integrated fermented milk products into the food culture for generations. And naturally fermented yogurt has always been made with whole milk because the industrial technology to process lower fat dairy products was not available.

Our current approach to healthy has been nutrient focused now for almost 50 years. Shifting the balance back to include food is long overdue.