Cake or Cupcake
Food · Grain · Food, Typed Supps
A treat, and one of the lighter cakes at that. Sponge gets its lift from whipped eggs rather than from butter.
Stage by stage
- Intake (Soft, quick to clear): Cake and icing are soft and dissolve fast, with little chewing required.
- Digestion (Little fibre): Fully gelatinised refined starch and under 1g of fibre mean almost nothing slows digestion.
- Bloodstream (Fast glucose rise): Sugars absorb quickly, producing a rise in blood glucose within the hour.
- Tissues (Used or stored): Glucose not needed immediately is stored; the saturated fat load matters only with regular intake.
Time to effect
- Under an hour: Blood glucose rises within roughly 30 to 60 minutes of eating.
Allergens
Contains: Gluten. May contain: Eggs. Derived from what this food is, not from a product label.
Eating patterns
Fits: Vegan, Vegetarian, Pescatarian, Halal, Kosher. Depends on the product: Low-FODMAP.
Satiety
93 on the satiety index, where white bread is 100 — low. Modelled from the Holt et al. (1995) measurements.
Environmental footprint
1.6 kg CO2e and 648 litres of freshwater per kg, matched to "Wheat & rye" in Poore & Nemecek (2018), Science 360.
Cost band
Cheap — roughly £2.5 per kg, as a band midpoint rather than a price.
Key nutrients
- Added sugar
- Refined starch
- Saturated fat
Nutrition per 100g
- Calories: 358
- Protein: 5g
- Carbohydrate: 61.6g
- of which sugars: 46.4g
- Fat: 11g
- of which saturated: 7g
- Fibre: 0.7g
- Sodium: 195mg
Food vs. supplement
Not applicable — an occasional treat food rather than a source of any nutrient worth planning around.
Kitchen tip
Sponge has no fat to hold it soft, so eat it the day it is made. Do not refrigerate cake — starch retrogradation, which is what staling is, runs fastest just above freezing.
Common myth
"Cake is cake — one slice is much like another." In reality: Fat content across the family varies several-fold. A plain iced sponge is around 11g fat per 100g because it rises on whipped egg; a mud or buttercream cake can be two to three times that.
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