Your Ultimate Sweetener Guide To Baking
Having trouble converting a sugar replacement for sugar?
Does your baked good turn out too bland or too sweet?
Or maybe you have found the perfect sweet spot but the texture isn’t quite right. No matter what you do, just can’t get it right.
Struggling to make your cupcake soft, sweet, and fudgy like the ones that are made with sugar?
Do you often find that your treats have an unpleasant, off-taste with a little of bitter or metallic linger?
Does this sound like you?
You have come to the right place! We walk you through how to choose the best sweetener for baking.
Let’s look at the photos below for a comparison:
Can you guess which cupcake is sweetened with SugarLike?
RED. That is right.
Let’s explore some of the differences between cupcakes made with SugarLike and another sugar alternative.
SugarLike
- Soft and moist
- Sweet without bitter or metallic taste
- 1x sweetness
- Dense, fudge-style
- Non-stick, great structural integration, doesn’t stick to paper cup, falls out easily
- Strong chocolate flavour
- Sweet taste does not mask the cocoa flavour of cupcake
- No crystallizations, even days after baking
Other Sugar Alternative
- Dry with lots of cracks
- A little bitter aftertaste that lingers for longer than 5 seconds
- Very sweet, overwhelms the other flavours and components in the cupcake
- Sticky, difficult to separate from paper cup
- Crystallizes only 1 hour after baking (white crystals)
- Falls out in clumps
To demonstrate a clear picture of how our sweetener compares to regular sugar and a sugar alternative in the market, we prepared a mini taste test below with three different sweeteners dissolved in water for you:
On the left: Sugar
In the middle: Another alternative sweetener
On the right: SugarLike
As you can see, sugar has a transparent body when dissolved in water. SugarLike’s cup looks exactly the same as the one with sugar.
In terms of taste, we asked ten volunteers, some food scientists and some random people to participate in this blind taste test. 90% of the volunteers couldn’t tell the difference between sugar and SugarLike. Some of the key words included: Same sweetness, smooth, clean, round sweet flavour that has no linger.
Green cupcake is sweetened with SugarLike sweetener
The trick to making your sugar-free cupcake look more like the one in red and green? It’s as simple as choosing a high quality sweetener that better imitates the functionality of sugar. In this case, it’s SugarLike zero calorie sweetener!
SugarLike zero calorie sweetener is made with monk fruit extract encapsulated in erythritol sweetener. Read more about SugarLike encapsulated monk fruit here.
There’s no complications, no magic behind a tasty dessert. The three things you need:
A great recipe
High quality ingredients;
and a little bit of love.
When you switch to SugarLike sweetener, you will have saved hours on conversions and disappointment. Even better, you will no longer have to rely on sugar to make your tasty sweets taste as good as to the ones you would find at bakeries!
No one will ever believe that your cupcake can be sugar free yet still taste so good, some say even better than real sugar!
Laura says that a good cupcake should have “little to no spread. And ofcourse flavor is a huge factor”.
Everyone wants a good solid cupcake recipe that they can depend on for parties, Birthday’s, all sorts of get together’s really. Cupcakes are versatile and travel wonderfully.
Another blind taste test
In addition to the mini test above, we had food scientists and volunteers perform a blind taste test on 10 sweeteners in the market, including SugarLike.
Now, taste is very important to us. That is why we have set up a blind taste test on SugarLike zero calories sweetener and 6 other sugar substitutes in the market and invited volunteers to participate. The blind taste test had 6 rating categories, including:
Appearance Flavour/Taste Sweetness (%SE) Texture/body Aftertaste OVERALL
- Sweetness of 5% means sweetness is 1x, comparable to sugar
- Overall is out of 10
THE RESULTS:
SWEETENER #1:
Appearance: Clear
Flavour/Taste: Clean, smooth, bright, peak early, slower sweet onset
Sweetness/Tartness: 5%
Texture/body: Thin, light, smooth
Aftertaste: None
Overall: 37/40
Sweetener #2:
Appearance: Clear
Flavour/Taste: Lower sweetness than #1, not as clean as no.1, bright, peak early, slight liquorice
Sweetness/Tartness: 5%
Texture/body: Similar to #1, not round
Aftertaste: A little dry, slight liquorice linger
Overall: 34/40
Sweetener #3:
Appearance: Clear
Flavour/Taste: Bright, lower sweetness, herbal/medicine-like taste, metallic
Sweetness/Tartness: 4 – 4.5%
Texture/body: Diluted, water-consistency
Aftertaste: Metallic linger, linger for more than 10s
Overall: 27.5/40
Sweetener #4:
Appearance: Clear
Flavour/Taste: Round, sugar-like, slight metallic, higher sweetness
Sweetness/Tartness: 7.5%
Texture/body: Light, thin, similar to 1
Aftertaste: Very little metallic linger
Overall: 30.5/40
Sweetener #5:
Appearance: Yellow, gold
Flavour/Taste: Flat, herbal taste, medicine-like, plant odor, metallic
Sweetness/Tartness: 4-4.5%
Texture/body: Light, thin, similar to 1
Aftertaste: Slight aftertaste (metallic/medicine)
Overall: 21/40
Sweetener #6:
Appearance: Clear
Flavour/Taste: Too sweet, liquorice, think, syrupy taste, bitter, bland
Sweetness/Tartness: 8-9%
Texture/body: Chalky dry, different sweet
Aftertaste: Liquorice, linger, bitter
Overall: 22/40
Sweetener #7:
Appearance: Brown with suspension, not fully-dissolved
Flavour/Taste: Medicine, bitter, dry, liquorice, very bitter, coarse particles
Sweetness/Tartness: 3-4%
Texture/body: Insoluble, not smooth nor clean
Aftertaste: Strong medicine taste and bitterness linger
Overall: 8/40
For more recipes and special promotions, keep up to date about our newest products, sign up and join our SugarLike community:
Sugar-free Keto Low Carb Brownie Cupcake
Serves 12
Ready in 30 minutes
Ingredients
- 2 1/2 cups Almond Flour
- 1 teaspoon Baking Soda
- 1/4 teaspoon Salt
- 1 Cup SugarLike Zero Calorie Sweetener
- 1/2 Cup Cocoa powder
- 3 Large Eggs, beaten
- 3/4 cup + 1 TBSP Greek Yogurt
- 2 teaspoons Vanilla Extract
INSTRUCTIONS
- Preheat the oven to 400F.
- Spray the tray with cooking spray or brush with some butter.
- In a large mixing bowl, combine almond flour, baking soda, salt, SugarLike Zero Calorie Sweetener and cocoa powder.
- Add in the beaten eggs, Greek Yogurt and vanilla extract. Stir well.
- Scoop the batter evenly into the muffin cups.
- Bake in the oven for 20 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.
- Top with sweetened whipped cream or keto buttercream frosting.
TIPS
- Greek Yogurt: Greek yogurt produces the light and fluffy texture. You can experiment with nut butter as well, they provide a very fudgy texture with nutty aroma that no one can resist. Greek yogurt actually has less carbs than sour cream and is packed with protein!
- SugarLike Zero Calories: Encapsulated with monk fruit. Granular sweetener that is a 1 for 1 substitute for sugar.
NUTRITION
For 1 cupcake:
Calories: 118 kcal | Carbohydrates: 6g | Protein: 6g | Fat: 9g | Saturated Fat: 1g | Fiber: 3g | Sugar: 1g