LET THEM EAT . . . ER, VEG?

These pretty cakes wouldn’t look out of place in a top bakery, but bite into them and you’ll taste salad!

IT’S lunchtime and you quickly pop out of the office to pick up a salad – but standing at the counter of a nearby café ready to place your order you catch a whiff of something delicious. You look down and there it is: a double chocolate cake with a whipped cream centre. It feels as if it’s calling to you. Suddenly all your good intentions fly out the window. Why is it that when it’s a toss-up between salad and cake, it’s the forbidden carb overload that wins almost every time? Aware of this painful dilemma, food stylist and designer Mitsuki Moriyasu has come up with a way of offering customers at her much talked about new restaurant in Japan a way to have their cake and eat it without suffering a moment’s guilt. But there’s a catch: her range of bright, beautifully decorated cakes are

Smade from . . . vegetables. Moriyasu invented her “salad cakes” as part of her ongoing quest to make greens more palatable.

Her mouthwatering gluten-free creations are made by blending whole vegetables – including the roots – with soy flour to give them a spongy texture. Despite their super-sweet appearance, they contain little or no sugar and the colourful icing is made by mixing vegetables with cream cheese or tofu. Although they might not completely satisfy your sweet tooth, they’ll contribute one or more of the five portions of veg you should be having every day.

Moriyasu sells her guilt-free products at her new restaurant, Vegedeco, in Nagoya in Japan’s Chubu region and, although they’re not selling like, er, hotcakes, sales are rising steadily.

But our appetite for tasty (often unhealthy) food and drink is notoriously difficult to satisfy and there are fears Moriyasu’s cakes could go the way of alcoholfree beer and vegetarian boerewors. Nice try – but unfortunately our tastebuds aren’t that easily fooled.