Healthy...but is it tasty?

The Good Life with Eli F.J. Tajanlangit

It is low sugar, low cholesterol and low calorie.

In short, this Vegan Chocolate Cake is guilt-free, health-wise. There’s just one catch: it doesn’t taste good, not for us with set and concrete ideas of how a chocolate cake should taste, not for us whose palates have been trained to recognize sugar the second it touches our tongues.

Brought to the market on the current wave of health and wellness food  products, Vegan Chocolate Cake looks exactly like those gooey chocolate cakes with the dark brown icing cascading downwards. I guess this is where it problem starts. It looks, but doesn’t taste, exactly like the chocolate we are literally dying to eat.

From its looks alone, it already inspires ideas of how it tastes like, but when you eat it and falls short of your preconceived notions, you are in for one big disappointment.

Which was how it was when I first tried vegan chocolate cake, one of the items in a healthy desserts line. Maybe, a cake as popular as chocolate shouldn’t be reengineered this way. Perhaps,  this healthy cake should be named something else to preclude any preconceived ideas.

You see,  this vegan chocolate cake is not exactly bad,, taste-wise. You only get disappointed because you think this is a healthy alternative to the deadly original.

The  vegan version uses  isomalt for sweetener, which is supposed to come from beets, which cannot definitely replace the sugar we are used to in terms of sweetness. It only uses soya milk, which has a character all its own, but definitely as similar to the milk we are used to. I’m not sure, but I think it doesn’t use eggs. So tell me, how can it tastes like the chocolate cake we are used to?

But it doesn’t taste bad, let me emphasize that. It is just disappointing and simply is does not meet expectations.

The other healthy desserts on offer here are passable alternatives to the original: carrot cake, banana walnut and the like. Again, maybe because these are not as popular as chocolate cake, they do not inspire preconceive ideas in one’s minds.

While the drive for healthy foods, especially on the desserts front, is unstoppable,  it must  contend with disappointments such as this.  There is a whole wide world of customers waiting to be served with these desserts, and whatever disappointment there is is worth solving.

The race, indeed, is on the desserts front, with cakes and other creations that are fiver-filled, energy-packed, low-sugar and the like being churned out in record pace.

This is where fruits, nuts and cereals, with proven health benefits, also come. Notice how many makers specialize on these?

Foods for health and wellness, after all, are the trends for the future and the first cooks and food manufacturers to come up with products that will engage the market are bound to make plenty of moolah.

Make that a little clearer: The first one to create a vegan chocolate cake that tastes exactly like the Cookie Monster version, for example is just bound to get rich.*

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