Taste test: baking with sugar substitutes

Can sugar substitutes ever compete with the real thing? We head to the loveFOOD kitchen to find out.

More than a quarter of British households buy artificial sweeteners, according to the NHS. They offer low-calorie options for dieters and choice for diabetics with a sweet tooth. But are they any good for baking with?

Baking works because of a series of chemical reactions between ingredients when heated. When the sugar is replaced by artificial sweeteners, do these interactions occur in the same way, and does it affect the results?

We made three sponge cakes containing Splenda, Canderel and Truvia (a stevia-based sweetener), and one with golden caster sugar. These were then blind taste tested by the loveFOOD office.

Here's how they scored.

Canderel – 2.4/10

This did not work out very well. A very flat cake with an “awful texture” – one person claimed that the name ‘cake’ should not even be applied here. Other comments included “no flavour” and “dry.”

A couple of people didn’t mind it so much, saying that it was ‘moist’, but this cake left a sour taste in many mouths.

Splenda – 3.6/10

Not much better than Canderel. At all. Lots of people said the texture was ‘eggy’, more like a quiche than a cake. It’s not that sweet, and according to one person, it tasted "like feet”?! “Dry, with a weird artificial taste” said another.

Really not very good at all.

Truvia – 5/10

This sweetener was noticeably better than Canderel and Splenda, but got a very mixed bag of reactions. “Nice enough buttery taste” said one taster who scored it fairly highly, but another commented on a bad aftertaste. This cake wasn’t very sweet at first, but the sweetness builds in your mouth until it’s rather cloying.

It wasn’t an awful cake in most people’s opinions, but it doesn’t do a good impression of the real thing either.

Sugar – 7/10

Comments such as “This is sugar!” and “Lovely!” along with doodles of smiley faces were left on the test sheets for this one. Buttery and sweet, it also seems that only sugar can make a cake that’s fluffy – all the other three struggled to rise

It did get called out for being a little dry, but we were testing naked sponge as toppings would have spoiled the test.

The sweetest thing

The Canderel and Splenda cakes were very, very flat, as you can see from the picture below. Almost pancake like, their texture was stodgy and thick, while the Truvia cake managed to rise a little higher but wasn’t hugely impressive.

We thought that sugar was the nicest tasting of the bunch, and also works from a practical point of view as the cake fluffs up well. It's the third from the left in the picture below.

Do you have any tips for baking using sweeteners? Let us know in the Comments below.

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