The Stevia Fruitcake Experiment

Since there might be a slight connection between sugar intake and tooth decay, and I've logged plenty of hours in the dentist's chair, I've decided to try some baking with stevia. I've had it in drinks before, and find the taste takes a bit of getting used to. So for my first official stevia-bake I mixed it up with rice sirup, an excellent sweetener which does not pull nutrients from your body like sugar does, but in fact has minerals and such.
The result was actually good, I was pleasantly surprised. I still had to have a tooth worked on today, though.

Here's what I used, I started out with a tiny cake to see how it would turn out:
125 g speltflour
30 g rice sirup
1 g green stevia powder
40 g organic margarine
1 tablespoon of soyflour + 2 tablespoons of cold water = substitute for 1 egg
vanilla powder or extract
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
soy-rice milk as needed
a dash of salt
tart canned cherries

Mix the ingredients except the fruit  together, place dough in a small pan or on a cookie sheet. Place cherries on top. Bake in a 175 degrees Celsius oven for approximately 25 minutes.

 The cake on the left is the one with stevia, to the right is the control group I baked with raw sugar, in case the experiment turned awful.

How I came to be a Vegan

First off, I never planned this. At the time, I was happily unconscious about food, although choosing organic as much as possible. I had been a vegetarian in the past, but had gone back to meat-eating when somebody told me about the 'Eat right for your type' theory, which states that I, as bloodtype O+ positively must eat meat, especially the red kind. I was at a conference, in Portland, OR, and I went right back to the counter for the barbequed chicken. They hadn't really done a good job with the tofu dish I had been picking at. Maybe that's why my energy was so low, I thought. Basically, an excuse as good as any other at the time.

I had often heard that cow's milk wasn't that great for humans, that the molecules are larger, and therefore we can't really digest it. So I tried at numerous times to use less of it, to substitute milk with soy or rice or almond milk, I tried various cheese substitutes. And I could never get used to it. I always had to go back to drinking cow's milk in my coffee. Nothing else tasted right. And I thought I could never live without cheese. I was a bread and cheese kind of woman. So when my doctor suggested I try to lay off all animal products for a while to see if I would feel better, I tried. I tried lactose-free milk and cheese, which didn't work for me. I tried different plant milks, and relapsed back to the cow stuff in no time.

And then, one day in April 2010, I had a very bad day, for numerous reasons, and one thing that stuck out to me was the graincoffee-latte I'd had the night before. That had been a lot of milk. I wondered if there might be a connection to the humongous headache I was having. Next time when I was at the healthfood store, when I was standing in front of the meat-and-dairy isle, I just didn't want to buy any of that stuff. I went home with oatmilk and an assortment of vegan spreads, which turned out to be delicious. And that was it, and I haven't really looked back since. Strangely, I now really like plant milk in coffee, on cereal, everything. Those first few weeks, I baked a batch of cookies with butter, because I still had some, and found the buttery taste gross.