US cake recipes, why are they always too sweet?

[ratcreature]

I made some this upside down apple cake, and I already reduced the sugar by a third in the cake (and put no sugar in the whipped cream), yet in combination it was still so sweet as to be almost inedible. This always happens to me with US cake recipes. Are other people having this problem? In principle I like sweet things, and the cake recipes that came with my mixer for example I make without reducing the sugar, so it's not like I'm against a sugary taste, but whenever I try a recipe from an US blog, things turn out too sweet. I guess I should bake more often to get a better feel for tolerable sugar amounts so I don't have to depend on the recipes.

Comments

[some_stars]

I probably like more sugar than you, but that recipe--holy crap. I would never use more sugar than flour. That's just freaky.

But yeah, Americans are crazy about sugar. It's because everything's sweetened here (generally with HFCS), even stuff that shouldn't be, like cereal and canned tomatoes and any other processed food you can think of. It's all drenched in corn syrup. Plus there's just a cultural expectation that dessert will be really extremely fucking sweet.

[ratcreature]

Yeah, I should have realized that it was too much sugar, even by a third reduced it was still as much sugar as flour. But I didn't really think too much, and generally I like sugar compared to others. My brother for example bakes sugar free apple cake, with just the sweetness from fruit itself, ever since he had children, because he doesn't want them to get habituated to processed sugar.

But sugar in canned tomato? Why? Tomatoes are already naturally sweet. Here in canned tomatoes only citric acid is added for conservation. Sometimes salt.

[kass]

I think this also becomes a class and income issue, too -- generally speaking, the cheapest groceries here in the States are the ones sweetened with high fructose corn syrup. So if one is on a low income, the foods one can afford tend to be the sweeter ones. Which is fucked-up, but there it is. :P