What’s The Right Birthday Cake?

What's the right birthday cake? 

Have you seen the list of ingredients for those cakes from the bakeries?

The ones you buy on a "special occasion"?

I spy GMOs, caramel colouring, refined wheat, Red #40, lots of preservatives, fake flavour, chemicals made out to be food and loads of refined sugar, all of which simulate our taste buds to the point of addiction. It's no wonder kids don't like vegetables. Their taste buds are hijacked at every bite with fake chemical ingredients.

I could write about peer-reviewed research on the chemical maze allowed in our food, but today, I will stick to sugar. Processed sugar is added to a product that isn't part of a whole food (so it wouldn't include the sugar naturally found in a whole banana, for instance). Here are some common examples of added refined sugar on an ingredient list: these are familiar words. Remember, these words are not used in different countries as numbers are replaced. And that's where we are hit with the "chemical maze," which is super complex and a rabbit hole all on its own.  

• Sugar 

• Cane Sugar

• High Fructose Corn Syrup

• Corn Syrup

• Brown Rice Syrup

• Invert Sugar

• Fruit Juice Concentrate

You may have heard the guidelines saying that adults should eat fewer than 25 grams of added sugar per day for good health. Well, it's even more strict for young children. In fact, it's recommended that toddlers under the age of two not eat any added sugar per day, and that the only "sugar" in their diet should include those naturally found in whole foods. Yet, the processed food industry doesn't care—they still add refined sugar to virtually everything via a word or a number. Almost all store-bought toddler snacks, cakes and drinks—even organic ones —have added refined sugar! 

What's super interesting is how we value sweet food, like the cakes we seem to talk ourselves into buying for our (young or growing teenage) kids after school or on a "special" occasion like a birthday cake. That's not cake. Or is it food? It's a science experiment that affects the health of our children's brains.

What if a special occasion cake was made without white sugar? And if the frosting was not covered in refined sugar or made without margarine? Or without fake flavors? What if there was a cake that didn't take from your health or the health of your family? 

What if……. 

So with that saying what if we naturally turned things around, valued nature, and celebrated our sweet tooth naturally? And what if we created a new value system that became the "new" normal when we craved something sweet?

As a chef and a food creator, I believe with all my heart that using fake ingredients that taste AMAZING (for some) is not clever. There is nothing clever about poisoning our children with a highly processed cake on their day of birth or an afternoon-coloured, highly processed snack after school.

As I write this sweet love note to you today, I am reminded of my son Jayman, who became addicted to sugar and still is to this day. As a mum with a child, I know too well what it's like. I am not here to shame you; I am here to pass on what I have learnt when working with doctors, biochemists, and clinical naturopaths over the past 25 years.

From my own experience I had a choice, so that choice was to educate Jayman to check ingredients and to look at the numbers on packets of food, I reminded him that "numbers are for counting, not for eating" and when he sees a number on the packet of 2 minute noodles or on anything sweet is to do his investigation in his time with a critical interest instead of me coming across like some psycho mum and doing the "good cop, bad cop" approach.

I allowed him to tell me what RED 40 is and what it does to the human body and the 78 organs we house.  From there, interest grew, and Jayman, as an adult, knows that nature gets it right every time and there is no place for science on the dinner table.  Lastly, before I go and chow down a really good piece of chocolate cake and back it up with a chocolate chip cookie here at Jhoii, I remember these words, "when you want something sweet its more likely to be a pleasure decision, not a health decision and wouldn't be grand if what was on the end of our "cake" spoon a slice of what nature requires from you"?

From our kitchen to yours we make the sweet things that don’t take from your health instead. Much love.

Click here to order celebration cakes without the dreaded refined sugar hangover. Yep, you heard that right—no sugar crash, just pure, delicious, Really Good Chocolate Cake birthday bliss.