Making the transition from baking delicious (calories don’t count) chocolate fudge cakes, to trying to create protein packed natural ingredient alternatives, is NOT as easy as I initially had hoped. As a baker I knew that the fundamentals would be replacing the fats, sugars and dry ingredients for healthy alternatives, and finding what those were is where my journey began.

I started by taking my classic vanilla cupcake recipe:

self-raising flour

butter

caster sugar

eggs

vanilla essence

milk

and started to list all the alternatives I could find.

Self Raising flour

As a rule half of my dry ingredients will be protein powder of some form, I have worked on adapting traditional recipes and making up the other half of the dry ingredients with one of these alternatives:

coconut flour, buckwheat flour, almond flour, brown rice flour, oat flour, quinoa flour.

Butter

Replacing the fats in protein baking can be tricky, fats in baking are essential to the baking process and enable heat to travel through the bake, helping with browning, and also give moisture to your bakes. Alternatives:

Coconut oil, nut butters (peanut, almond, hazelnut), greek yoghurt, applesauce, black beans, pumpkin puree, avocado.

Caster Sugar

Agave Nectar, Honey, Stevia, Walden Farms syrups, The Protein Works zero syrups.

Eggs are fine to use in your protein baking so no need to substitute, milk can be replaced with soya, almond, coconut or hazelnut milk, and the vanilla essence is replaced by the flavours coming from the protein powder, and other ingredients.

Now it was just a matter of getting the balance of ingredients right, and flavour combinations. Let the fun begin.