I eat healthily, but my meals are never really complete without pudding. Yoghurt and stewed fruit aside, do you have any suggestions for what will hit the spot without verging too far into the unhealthy?
Wendy, by email
The truth is, you can’t often have your cake and eat it – or not a big piece, anyway. “My main piece of advice, which maybe isn’t all that welcome, is to keep to small portions,” says Brian Levy, author of Good & Sweet, in which his recipes contain no added sugar. “My grandma would keep many chocolate bars and have just one, but that’s never really worked for me.”
’Tis the season for stewed fruit, but have you tried Melissa Hemsley’s banana slices sandwiched together with peanut butter, half-dipped in melted chocolate and put in the freezer? (FYI the same tactic also works like a dream with dates.) “You can’t beat frozen grapes, either,” says baker Lily Jones, who’s behind the London by Lily Vanilli afternoon tea at the Four Seasons Tower Bridge. To “level them up a notch”, she sprinkles those with chilli flakes, salt or freeze-dried sour cherries.
Equally chill would be Jones’s frozen peanut butter bites, which also happen to be gluten-free: “They’re peanut butter, maple syrup, oat milk and sea salt frozen into bite-sized moulds.” They’re then dipped in dark chocolate before being returned to the freezer, and are “the perfect hit of sweet that’s really satisfying, and also have healthy fat and protein”.
Otherwise, try a batch of Levy’s caramel apples: “They are rich and flavourful, chewy, buttery caramels sweetened only with fruit [apple juice and dates], plus a little miso.” It’s worth leaning into unrefined sugars, such as honey and maple syrup, too, says fellow sweet-tooth Flora Shedden, author of Winter in the Highlands: “I’m terrible, but I don’t want my kids to have tons of refined sugar, although they’re now addicted to dates and prunes – it’s as if they’ve got the palate of an 80-year-old.”
There are, however, some cravings that only a cookie can satisfy, and thankfully Shedden has a solution for such situations. “It’s quite a flexible recipe: mix oats, spelt flour or ground almonds, maybe some coconut, and perhaps a few nuts for natural sweetness, then bind that with a mix of tahini and maple syrup,” she says. “If your tahini has a thick consistency, you might need a bit of oil to loosen it. And you’ll also need to add a bit of bicarb and some vanilla.” Roll the mix into balls, flatten slightly, then arrange on trays lined with baking paper and bake at 180C (160C fan)/350F/gas 4, until golden brown and firm. You could up the ante, Shedden says, by whizzing frozen bananas à la Jamie Oliver, with yoghurt, maple syrup and a little cocoa powder into a “kinda ice-cream”, and use that to sandwich two cookies together.
If all else fails, Levy’s advice would be simply to hunker down with some dark chocolate (“70% cocoa or more”) and a cup of Celestial Seasonings Bengal spice tea: “Spices can fool your palate into thinking you’re having something sweeter than you actually are,” he explains. Now that really would be sweet.
