Scrumptious cakes can be easy on the calories – if you bake with vegetables. We try some unlikely recipes

My first reaction to the book Red Velvet and Chocolate Heartache was that I can’t stand the way it is written. All the vegetables are given a personality. Many of the recipes also have a personality. The Chocolate and Salted Caramel Squillionaire, a kind of millionaire’s shortbread, has a gender (“he is just too good to lose”). Well, look, it’s a book about fancy cakes with low calorie counts (to clarify, according to the author: “I didn’t write this book because I’m obsessed with healthy food. I wrote it because I adore cake”) . The woman behind it, Harry Eastwood, could never be accused of being embarrassed to be girly.

Her previous book was Cook Yourself Thin, and the principles here are, I think, broadly the same. Most things can be rendered less gut-busting with the addition of low-cal ballast. It’s an old Californian joke to take regular food and add a load of prunes (leeks, for a savoury “treat”), but that seems to be the way to write for this cake-loving, self-loathing audience. The orange-blossom cupcakes (“light, bright and pretty. They’re also a little fickle, and not without ambition. Don’t be surprised if they compliment you on your hair, the week before your birthday party invitations are being handed out . . .”) contain butternut squash, whose calorie count raw is, I believe (what am I talking about? I went to an all-girls’ school, and I know this to be true), 38 per 100g. That is pretty low. One of the cakes I made, the Heartache Chocolate, contained aubergine, which has a calorie count so low it almost defies the laws of physics (15 per 100g).

So underneath all the schmaltz, this is quite a good idea. Many of us have a phobia of cakes with vegetables in, but this would – I strongly suspect – be a 70s and 80s hangover from hateful baking, undertaken by people who wanted the carrots and other roots to taste like roots. Hippies actively enjoyed ruining treat-food with stinking parsnip. The mode these days – when Nigella has a courgette cake, or Nell Nelson introduces the beetroot chocolate cake – is for the vegetables to play a more subtle role. At the very least, not deliberately to make things that are disgusting.

So, in this spirit, I chose to try out recipes where the vegetables concerned were not enormously tasty in and of themselves. Squash is a case in point. So I did the Banana and Toffee Sticky Cake, which weight for weight contained more butternut than banana. It also uses eggs, sugar, rice flour, ground almonds and nuts. First, though, this Heartache Chocolate cake: I quibbled with the expectation that we would all have a microwave, when I believe actually not that many people do (without one, there’s a 40-minute preamble, while you bake the aubergines. If you were in a hurry . . . well, almost any other chocolate cake would be quicker). Once you go through all that, though, you proceed as normal, cook the cake, and at some point “your kitchen will just sing with the smell of hot chocolate”. I must contest this: all chocolate cakes make your kitchen smell of chocolate – this, conversely, made me think, “What’s that weird smell? Aubergine? An aubergine, in a hot chocolate? Oh yes, I’m making a weird cake.”

The butternut squash for the banana cake also added a layer of hassle that those not on a diet might be able to do without. You have to peel it and grate it; more time-consuming by far than cracking an egg.

Anyway, so there was my kitchen singing its strange song, and I greeted the chocolate cake at this pitch of mild hostility, left it to cool and noticed thereupon that it gleamed in a beautiful way. Cakes in books often gleam, but I put this down to the food stylist. Cakes never gleam in my house. Still sceptical, I didn’t even taste it till the next day.

The banana cake, too, smelled delicious , and again, came out looking unusually good; you might almost say professional. Luck of the draw, I thought. The chocolate cake continued to shine, but it also looked brick-heavy. It has no sugar in it, did I mention? Only honey and chocolate. I had a wholemeal kid over for a playdate, and he fell upon it, but my own offspring, properly acquainted with jammy dodgers and other refinements, wouldn’t touch it.

Finally, I had some. It was delicious. I’m not kidding around. It was moist but not heavy, almost moussy. Surprisingly, the honey was not overbearing. You couldn’t really taste it, in fact. Then I checked the calorie value, which was 216 per slice. That is incredible. Even the most meagre Boots’ Shaper meal can’t bring in a limp sandwich that low, and this was a fully fledged, chocolate-loaded, gleaming bit of cake. The Banana and Toffee Sticky Cake had a bit more bang for its buck, but still, 360 calories per slice was very respectable. Again, it tasted good.

This book still isn’t what I’d read in the bath, and I still think the best way not to be fat, if that’s what you’re after, is to get a hobby that doesn’t involve cake. But Eastwood is on to something. These cakes would be brilliant if you had sweet-fiend children and you worried about their intake; or if you had a sweet tooth and a heart condition. Or if you had an organic box and you were sick of soup. Or . . . I must stop trying to weasel out of this. These are good recipes. I was wrong, and I apologise.

Red Velvet and Chocolate Heartache (Bantam Press, £20).