The Garden School Tattler

People are always asking about food at the Garden School. We make a lot of things kids really love. Yesterday I made a chocolate cake for the kids for snack, and Amy said they fought over the last crumb. My chocolate cakes are healthy and have fewer grams of sugar than that terrible syrupy yogurt that passes for food.

If you've ever made yogurt, you know it's not sweet - it's barely palatable plain. So 15-25 grams of sugar have to be added to half a cup of yogurt before kids will eat it. 15- 25 grams of sugar are 4-6 teaspoons. That's 1/3 of the daily sugar recommendation in a good diet. If kids eat this for breakfast, they get a sugar high to start the day. Might as well give them milk chocolate. Throw apple juice on the pile at 22 grams or 4 more teaspoons of sugar per cup and a big bowl of sweet cereal and milk and the child is going to ooze. No wonder parents are struggling with behavior problems starting early every morning.

Cutting out this kind of breakfast is not hard. Try hard boiled eggs or plain unsweetened bread as toast with cream cheese. Look at the sugar content in bread. Some breads have as much as 6 grams of sugar per slice - that's a teaspoon and a half of sugar!

If children must have sugar on their breads in the morning, try Benedictine fudge. It's peanut butter and honey mixed. At least the honey has some medicinal body building elements.

Later in the day, children really need the calories to keep it going, but calories don't have to be boring nor do they have to be wasted.

In a recipe for chocolate cake - my chocolate cake - there is a cup of sugar or 48 teaspoons in a whole cake. If you cut the cake into 24 pieces that's 2 teaspoons of sugar per piece or half to 1/3 the sugar in the yogurt.

So what else is in the cake?

2.5 cups whole wheat flour
1/2 cup bran
1/3 cup fresh ground flax
1 cup sugar
2/3 cups cocoa
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup canola oil
2 eggs
1.5 cups hot water
3 teaspoons cinnamon
1 teaspoon pumpkin pie spice

Mix and bake at 350 for about 35 minutes.

Cooking for kids means understanding kids. They LOVE sweets and by giving them too many, we upset their body balance. We are trying to cut back on sweets at the GS and engineer our food to be rich, healthy and delicious as we can. Try the cake; it's a good!