Hi everybody!
I live in Germany and am working on building up a cake recipe repertoire. My problem is that many of my (German) friends have complained about my cakes being too sweet. Have any of you tried leaving some of the sugar out of your standard recipes? How does that work? Does it impact the cake in any other way? Or do you have any less-sweet (scratch) recipes you could recommend?

Thanks for any help you might be able to offer!

Jenny

I often reduce the sugar amounts in cakes with no side effects.

I find a lot of the US recipes are way too sweet for most Europeans.

I would be a bit iffy about messing around with something delicate like airy sponge recipes or stuff like that.

Sturdier cake recipes seem to survive a decrease in sugar for me anyway.

If you are adding things like puddings to cake recipes bear in mind these things already have sweetners in them.

My advice would be to experiment with a few different recipes and lessen the sugar and even fats and oil amounts and see what you come up with.

Can't really recommend any good recipes in so far as most of what I have tried is too sweet or buttery/oily.

I have spent the last year experimenting and still have not found what I would deem my perfect white/yellow cake.

DH says I am too hard to please and he's probably right as I have never had a bad review!

If you are going to use a box mix and doctor it up maybe don't add any extra sweet stuff like pudding, sugar etc. The box mix is already sweet enough.

Not that we get a great selection of box mixes, sad in one way and in another way maybe it's for the best.

THanks banba. I suppose I'll just have to play around. Unfortunately I can't use box mixes - all they have here are the standard German cake mixes and those are usually incredibly dry. The texture is completely different, too.

I guess we'll be eating cake experiments for a while!

To make your experimenting more successful, here's some info you might find helpful.

Detailed information on basic cake ingredients:

http://www.joyofbaking.com/BasicIngredients.html

http://tinyurl.com/3bqrgd

Technical cake help:

http:://tinyurl.com/32et2h

Transforming baking fats:

http://tinyurl.com/5ub8ad

Cake structure and palatability as affected by emulsifying agents and baking temperatures:

http://tinyurl.com/2lupz3

Keeping a cake from becoming rubbery:

http://www.ochef.com/625.htm

Found some highlt rated cake recipes that use less sugar than most....

A butter cake recipe:

http://www.joyofbaking.com/YellowButterCake.html

Pound cake recipe:

http://www.recipezaar.com/55407

White cake recipes:

http://www.cakecentral.com/cake_recipe-2165-0-A-Better-White-Scratch-Cake.html

http://www.recipezaar.com/39368

HTH

Thanks JanH!
You really are a knowledge queen!

That should keep me busy for a while