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

[thirdblindmouse]

Anything from Joy of Cooking can have its sugar reduced considerably without fear of undersweetening.

Oddly, I compared the two cake recipes in my cookbook, and the one from my American grandmother has a lower ratio of sweetening agent to flour than the one from my European great aunt. Maybe because it's a family recipe; I've generally found baked goods introduced as made from old family recipes are not as sweet. It's possible that recipe books (and people who learned to bake based on them) may be trying to mimic the mass-produced baked goods sold in supermarkets. I don't know why the regional difference, though.

[ratcreature]

In the cake dough book that came with my mixer with a list of standard doughs the basic one you use for say just a plain raisin cake, it uses 150g sugar for a cake with 500g flour.

[thirdblindmouse]

Yeah, without taking into account the raisins, that sweetener-to-flour ratio would be on the low end among my pastry recipes. My cinnamon cake recipe has 1:1 sugar to flour if you include the topping, while the cherry cake recipe has 1:1 sugar to flour plus up to a pound of fruit plus unquantified cinnamon sugar.