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

[busaikko]

You have my sympathy.... I usually am pretty brutal to my US recipes. As i live in Japan, the apples here are sweet and not sour, so I usually don't add sugar at all to apple cakes/pies; US baking apples are really sour. Also, US recipes don't separate the eggs, whereas most Japanese cakes involve whipping the egg whites to a foam which is folded into the mixture - I don't know why, but this means the cake is less sweet! [a strawberry shortcake recipe, but I think 120g sugar is too much, I'd halve it] (US cakes tend to be very dense, like a pound cake, with lots of butter and sugar, which is why one forkful is usually enough to fill you up....)

Chemically, I am not sure what role sugar plays in baking, but if you are including fruit you probably don't need sugar -- and you can use something like fruit syrup or whipped cream to adjust the sweetness of your unsweet cake. With apples, if they are juicy then their juice will make its own syrup at the bottom of the pan. Not as shiny-pretty as caramel sauce, but less likely to do horrible things to your teeth...

[ratcreature]

I didn't know that about US baking apples. I mean, the recipe lists Granny Smith, which is not what I used, but the Granny Smith here are not that sour. I mean, you can eat them raw and they taste nice unlike for example the apples the old tree in my brother's garden produces, which you really want to cook before eating.