Pear and Pecan diabetes-friendly cake

When Dom at Bellau Kitchen announced that this month's challenge at random recipes was "Something Sweet" to be chosen by an internet search, I thought at first that I wouldn't be joining in, because I'm diabetic and one of the ways I control my condition is by avoiding sweet things, apart from fruit in moderation and the very occasional use of stevia and Sweet Freedom. However I decided to see if I could find a suitable recipe. And I think most diabetics must find giving up sweet foods a huge struggle, because when I searched for "Diabetes friendly desserts" I got almost three quarters of a million results, and most of the ones I looked at contained between 10 and 30 recipes. That's an awful lot of recipes to pick from!

I just scrolled and clicked at random on a link on the first page of results, and then looked to see if the page had anything I fancied - and had the ingredients for. Many of the recipes I checked needed Xylitol, or obscure American things like "fat free unsweetened condensed milk" that I probably wouldn't buy even if I could. Oh, and a lot of the pages were riddled with pop ups, hundreds of the darned things that popped up over and over again faster than I could close them and filled my computer up with soup. Now I've remembered why I still use recipe books!

So it was a huge relief to find this recipe for Pear Spice Cake With Toasted Walnuts - at this point I'll let you pop over to have a look at the recipe and the gorgeous photos, and get the puerile (should that be puellile in my case?) laughter at the line "I highly suggest you toast your nuts before you use them" out of the way before you read on.

I followed the recipe exactly, apart from replacing the walnuts with pecans, one of the suggested variations, simply because my bag of pecans was already open. My experiments with baking diabetes friendly cakes in the past have resulted in a sad, heavy mess but this worked much better.

The result - I absolutely love it! Mark isn't so keen. I don't think it's sweet enough for him and he finds the cinnamon too strong. He also said it was slightly underdone in the middle, but I quote from the recipe " the center had a pudding like texture that was creamy & indulgent" so I reckon I nailed it. Sorry, Dom, but I appear to have had yet another #randomrecipes success.

I'm joining in with Random Recipes at Belleau Kitchen  and #CookBlogShare at Supergoldenbakes