Chocolate cake does not have to be the devil’s food for dieters. A low-fat chocolate cake can be made with egg whites, applesauce, or bananas instead of high-fat ingredients like eggs, oil, and butter to keep the batter moist and airy during baking. Some variations even go as far as to make chocolate cake low in calories. Sugar is replaced with artificial sweeteners or honeys, and all-purpose flour is replaced with oat or whole-grain flour in these recipes.
Regular chocolate cake does not get its fatty reputation from the cocoa powder used to flavor its batter, which has an average calorie count of around 250 calories per slice. Everything else in the recipe, from the eggs, oil, and butter in the batter to the milk chocolate, sugar, and even the cream cheese or sour cream in the frosting, contributes to its success. Some cooks will try to replace just a few of these high-fat or high-sugar ingredients, while others will try to replace all of them.
Separating the yolks from the egg whites and only using the latter ingredient is an example of a recipe that replaces only some fatty ingredients. To make any low-fat chocolate cake even lower in fat, use skim milk or skim yogurt instead of whole dairy products. Another binding material, such as bananas or applesauce, could be used in place of eggs, as well as butter or oil, making this dessert suitable for any vegan diet.
Because simple sugars are prone to conversion to adipose tissue if not quickly used as fuel, many low-fat chocolate cake recipes use artificial sweeteners instead of granulated sugar. Even if fruit has been used for binding and sweetening, it is especially important to compensate with honey, sugar, or artificial sweetener when unsweetened chocolate chips are used in a recipe. Otherwise, the final product will lack the distinctive flavor of chocolate cake.
Many people opt for a tried-and-true recipe that comes highly recommended, because any cake requires precision to produce satisfying results. To keep the dessert’s signature flavor, Taste of Home magazine uses all-purpose flour and real sugar in its low-fat chocolate cake recipe. To eliminate the fattiest contributors, the recipe simply substitutes corn syrup for oil or butter and only uses egg whites. To make a creamier cake, another recipe substitutes low-fat yogurt and applesauce for corn syrup.