Tag Archives: no sugar birthday

A Year Of No Sugar: Post 44

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Greta's Cake

Birthday cake is good. I recently discovered it tastes even better when you can’t remember the last time you actually ate cake.

By special request of the birthday girl, the dutch chocolate cake recipe I made for Greta’s eleventh birthday is my grandmother’s, and ends up making an appearance in our house at least once a year. It’s one of those funny old recipes that actually uses Crisco (gasp!) and instructs you to do all sorts of weird things like put baking soda in hot water before adding it to the batter and sour the milk by adding vinegar to it.

I love stuff like that. I love that my grandmother made this cake for my mom, my mom made this cake for me, and now I’m making it for my family. I love the weird instructions that harken back to an age when people thought nothing of taking the time to trace the cake pans with a pencil on wax paper to line the baking pans with. It’s nice too, that it somehow results in a remarkably moist and not-overly sweet cake that everyone seems to love. It is inevitably topped off with my grandmother’s version of buttercream frosting which is essentially a boatload of butter and powdered sugar thrown together with a teeny bit of vanilla. That part is awfully sweet, and every year I find myself wondering (heresy!) what another frosting might be like on my grandmother’s chocolate cake… but I haven’t had the nerve to try it yet.

Of course, you only turn eleven once; not to mention the fact that we only have one dessert a month around here these days, so we really did it up by putting a small ball of vanilla ice cream on top of each slice. I have to admit, in addition to being delicious, the total effect was achingly sweet to my recalibrated taste buds; I felt instantly jittery and got a dramatic sugar-rush to my head that lasted at least half an hour. Oo- yuck.

The next night, we ate the last of the cake- and once again I enjoyed it, but also didn’t. Now a full four months into our Year of No Sugar, I really do feel like a firm taste-shift has occurred, and sweets hold much, much less appeal for me. I enjoy our monthly treat, but now notice that I pay for it: I feel kinda icky. Had it always been so and I just never really noticed?

It wasn’t till later that it occurred to me to do the math: the cake recipe called for two cups of sugar, and the icing called for three cups of powdered sugar… the cake divided into twelve slices, so per serving that would be… holy cow! .41666667 -nearly half a cup of sugar per serving!! And that’s not including the ice cream. Well no wonder I got a headache. It’s a miracle my body didn’t stage a full-scale revolt.

Greta's Concoction

A few days later some friends stopped by on their way home from dinner, and happened to have ice cream in the car for that night’s dessert. My friend Katrina said of course, they would wait till they were home- they certainly wouldn’t make us watch them eat ice cream while we ate our No Sugar “dessert”: a blueberry-and-lemon juice concoction Greta had invented while I made dinner.

Now, I was already proud of Greta’s inventiveness in the pastry department, but then she really surprised me: “You can bring the ice cream up,” she said to our friends, “Really! I don’t mind. I had birthday cake a few days ago. I’m good!”

Well, knock me over with a feather.

A Year of No Sugar: Post 20

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It’s hard to know whether I’m being a killjoy or not. I mean- of course I am. No sugar? Hel-lo? But my thought along the way has been that there are lots of ways to celebrate, to have fun, to mark milestones… we’re just removing one of them, right?

And yet. My mom put it best when she mentioned she had purchased Valentines for the girls with no candy. It was hard, she said, not only because sugar is everywhere, but because buying special celebratory treats with sugar in them is “a lot of the fun.” Taking the sugar out of Valentine’s Day for my mom might be akin to taking the roller coasters out of amusement parks for others: like, why would you do that? Isn’t that messing with the point of the whole thing?

Yes- but, in our culture at least, we don’t ride roller coasters for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Riding a roller coaster is, I even would venture to say, a “special” activity. Over time, and due to the ever-increasing cheapness of corn-based sugars in particular, food manufacturers have become expert at hiding sugar in virtually every ingredient in practically every meal. So what’s my problem? Here is my problem: sugar isn’t special anymore. We just think it is.

This is how one can go, for example, to a kid’s birthday party and have a meal consisting of pizza with sugar in the crust, sugar in the tomato sauce, and a big glass of sugar to drink, by which I mean fruit juice. By the time we get to the overt sugar of dessert, we often don’t realize how much sugar we’ve already had. Multiply this by three times a day…? Add in the fact that dessert in Brobdingnagian portions is available at practically every restaurant into which one ventures? “Death by Chocolate” may be right.

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So last night my husband Steve and I enjoyed a much more successful date night than two weeks ago, managing to have a nice meal at a restaurant in a nearby town. When I asked the waitress if the nachos contained any sugar (hey- you didn’t think I was going to eat tofu and dirt, did you?) she immediately asked if I was avoiding carbs, or sugar in particular. “No sugar as an ingredient,” I clarified, impressed with her quickness on the topic; clearly she has dealt with many a client seeking to satisfy the requirements of one eating plan or another. I mentioned that I was particularly wondering about the corn chips or the salsa.

She assured me that there was no sugar in any aspect of the nacho appetizer. Despite her confidence, I had to wonder… really? I mean, how do you know? Are we counting all of sugar’s many aliases too? I mean, it’s been a month plus and I’m still learning new ones. It makes me think of the two girls in my older daughter’s class who are deathly allergic to nuts… if I end up unknowingly eating some dextrose or evaporated cane syrup in my meal, it isn’t going to kill me after all. It’s difficult to imagine how worrisome an ordinary thing like dinner at a restaurant must be for anyone with such serious ingredient concerns.

Food in our society has gotten sufficiently complicated that one feels the need to bring a magnifying glass and a wikipedia search engine to every list of ingredients one encounters, not to mention adding an extra hour to our day for deciphering. And who does that? It’s just too hard. Eat the darn thing- we say in surrender- it’s probably not going to kill you. It seems to me that today’s time-saving food products are like tax returns: the only people who know what’s in them anymore are the professionals.

A Year of No Sugar: Post 12

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Avoiding certain foods reminds me of being pregnant. When I found out I was pregnant- both times- I commenced the time-honored tradition of beginning to mildly lose my mind. Immediately, on the advice of my small library of pregnancy books, I swore off alcohol and caffeine. Also jaywalking, swimming within twenty minutes of eating and watching any form of reality television. And both times it was the beginning that was memorably rough, trying to get used to the idea that something I regularly consumed and enjoyed was- whoops!- off the table. “Yes, I’d love a glass/cup of…of… I mean, uh, no. Thank you.”

And as any woman who has been pregnant can tell you, one experiences hunger as if it is a brand new sensation. After my fourteenth snack of the day I’d go to bed and have vivid dreams about food in which I’m pretty sure I salivated and chewed in my sleep.

I craved sweets, chocolate in particular, but every time I took a bite of anything chocolatey the most peculiar thing happened: it would turn to dust in my mouth. Literally, it tasted as appetizing as wallpaper paste. So other desserts became, of course, quintessentially important.

Thus, one of my most memorable pregnant moments occurred at my cousin Gretchen’s surprise fortieth birthday party for her husband Randy. I was feeling large and uncomfortable, and the 2 1/2 hour drive to get there seemed much longer. I recall floating my blimp-like self down to the ladies room for what was my ninth or tenth visit, when I was offered a beautiful slice of pastry- a Napoleon- by a passing waiter. Since I thought it perhaps in questionable taste to bring my dessert into the bathroom with me to pee, I demurred; I’d wait till I was back at my table.

Big mistake. Huge. By the time I returned to my table there were no beautiful, fluffy, shiny little slices of Napoleon left. All gone. The alternative? Chocolate cake.

I sat in watery-eyed silence and longingly, resentfully watched the guests at my table eat their desserts. How could they? I wondered with my pregnant-lady brain. I stopped just shy of sending my husband to announce from the balcony that there was a pregnant lady emergency and would some kind soul be willing to donate their Napoleon to a good cause?

I kid you not: I have never cared about a piece of food in my life as much as that untouchable Napoleon. So much of one’s pregnancy is spent feeling hungry for some unnamable something that when you actually find the thing that will satisfy that hunger- it is as if the clouds have parted and the heavenly choir is singing. Then to have it snatched away…? It was almost more than my hormone-addled brain could take. I was on the verge of tears in the car on the way home. I couldn’t stop thinking about how deprived I felt; how I should’ve taken dessert with me to the bathroom; how unfair it was for everyone to have dessert but me. At that moment it seemed as if the big hole in my middle that would remain hungry and incomplete… forever. All I can say is that those guests were lucky I wasn’t armed.

Of course looking back it all seems so ridiculous. Crying over a pastry? I have no idea what actual hunger really feels like- the kind that comes from genuine deprivation, and for that I am supremely grateful. It’s because I am lucky enough to have enough food on a daily basis that I can make the privileged decision to carry out an experiment such a sugar-less year in the first place.

Nonetheless it’s also worth noting the amazing power food and our brain can exert over us- when you live in a land of plenty it is certainly easy to forget.

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Information About The No Sugar Project