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

[brownbetty]

I dunno, but it helps to remember that the US government subsidizes corn, and as a result, has a shitload of corn-syrup they either have to convince people to eat, or bulldoze down a hole.

[ratcreature]

Sugar beet production has long been supported by the EU, though I think they reformed that not too long ago. Also the result were artificially high sugar prices, iirc, so that way to support sugar beet farmers wouldn't have increased sugar consumption, I don't think, just made cane sugar more expensive, so sugar beets were competitive and all sugar cost more. I did notice that in the last years more and more convenience products here also have this corn-syrup stuff, which I think is due to the sugar protection ending in the trade agreements and stuff, so now corn syrup is cheap here too.

[brownbetty]

Yes, but the US doesn't subsidize corn by raising the price, it does it by paying farmers to produce corn, whether or not there is a demand, which naturally drives the price down quite a bit.

[ratcreature]

Yeah, that would be both anti "free market" and bad for nutrition. Here the cheapest kilo sugar in the supermarket costs about 85¢ right now, though a while ago it was only 70¢. They then raised the prices because commodity prices rose. (As the price rise was anticipated a lot of people were hoarding sugar, and on top of that for a while the sugar prices in Poland were already higher and buying across borders in the border regions, so a lot of super markets would restrict the amount of sugar they were selling to you. My supermarket had a sign announcing that they wouldn't sell more than five packages of sugar to customers, which was quite WTF? for me, not because I wanted to hoard sugar, but because I'm not really used to stores rationing like that.)