Cooking corner: Valentine’s Day cake cutouts

Helen Taylor Smith

guest columnist

For Valentine’s Day, make this delicious, fat-free, dairy-free, cholesterol-free, low-sweet cake with a very rich, chocolate taste to satisfy chocolate lovers.

The recipe uses applesauce to replace fat and egg whites to replace whole eggs, and it yields a very moist finish.

This kid-friendly recipe gives them a chance to make heart cutouts of the finished cake and either eat it plain or frost with a simple frosting to spell out a name or some other endearing term. Or use tiny candies to decorate.

Fred Meyer’s natural food section carries many of the ingredients listed below. If you’re using egg whites for an icing, be sure they are pasteurized. Only use trans fat-free shortening made by Sprectrum.

Most shortening is made with partially hydrogenated oils that are bombarded with hydrogen to make them solid. Trans fats are known to raise bad cholesterol (LDL) and lower good cholesterol (HDL).

Avoid products made with cottonseed oil.

Ingredients

1 cup unbleached organic flour

1/2 cup cocoa powder

1/3 cup evaporated cane juice (unbleached sugar)

2 teaspoons aluminum-free baking powder (Rumford brand)

1/2 cup egg whites

1/2 cup unsweetened applesauce

3/4 cup water

1 teaspoon pure vanilla

Technique

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees. Lightly spray a 10-by-15-inch cookie sheet pan with vegetable oil, and lightly dust it with flour. Shake out any excess. Set aside.

Set a sifter on a large sheet of wax paper on your work surface. Place the flour, cocoa powder, sugar crystals and baking powder into the sifter, and sift it together.

Put the sifted ingredients into a 2 quart mixing bowl.

In a 1 quart mixing bowl, whisk together the egg whites, applesauce, water and vanilla. Pour the liquid ingredients into the dry ingredients, and whisk it thoroughly for at least a minute to be sure the batter is blended and smooth.

The batter will be thin. Pour it into the prepared pan, and the spread batter evenly for uniform baking.

Bake for about 15 minutes, or until a thin-bladed knife that’s inserted near the center can be pulled out cleanly.

This is a fat-free cake, so do not overbake it, or the edges will become dry and crack.

Cool the cake in the pan until it’s completely cool to the touch. Leave it in the pan, and, with a heart-shaped cookie cutter, cut out as many hearts as you can.

Place the cutter close to each cutout in order to get as many cake hearts as possible.

All the leftover pieces will be eaten by eager little helpers.

Yield — Variable, depending on the size of the cutter.

Cooking Corner columnist Helen Taylor Smith, “The Healthy Cook,” can be reached by e-mail at thecook@thehealthycook.com. This recipe is supplemental to and property of “Cooking Healthier with the Healthy Cook” by Helen Taylor Smith. Permission is granted for personal use only. No commercial use permitted without explicit written contract with the author.