Devils Food Follow up

Following my previous posting, my good friend the talking tree, made a couple of good points. The first is simply that packet mixes don't really save time. In the past I have tried them, but found that I could make from scratch most cakes as quickly as a packet mix. However understand what Ms Tree means about waiting for the butter to soften, but here is a neat trick I learnt years ago. You can use butter straight from the fridge and if you cut it into cubes say half an inch dice, it softens in your hands, in minutes.

I do use butter rather than margarines unless I am making something that is for a vegan. However when I was a child, butter was being made demonic and as being bad for the heart. This data was being pushed out by the manufacturers of spreads. While the statistics were not incorrect regarding butter, it was not the whole story. As simply what was making butter unhealthy was the way that cows were being intensively reared. As in 2009 work at a British university discovered that traditional grass fed cows produced milk and butter that was more nutritious and healthy than even the health spreads.

Therefore the real problem was and is intensive farming. Just as the other point that Ms Tree raised. In her comment she made the point that the chemicals in cake mixes were causing a woman who was measuring her blood sugar to spike in a way that cakes made from scratch did not. And this highlights one of the problems with the safety testing of these additives in food. They are tested on very healthy people. Thus, if everyone was very healthy and fully fit, they are fully safe. But in the real world we all have minor health problems, and these chemicals effect the different conditions in different people. Additionally, each it tested separately, yet several will be used in a single product. They are never safety tested as a combination. Further, there is no safety testing system that looks at what the cocktail of chemicals we are all subjected to. This is all a good reason to avoid overly processed food if you can.

Well as I have tempted my long suffering reader, here is a link to the recipe for Devils Food on my new Food and Cooking Blog