UPDATE: After taking delivery of veg suet, I realise it’s got palm oil in it :( There are lots of reasons to avoid using this stuff. My adice is drop from 50g to 40g of beef suet rather than using 50g of veg suet.

I love Jam Roly-Poly, but adding suet to jam and pastry is hardly healthful or low-calorie. So I’ve been wondering if I can do a makeover and make… well if not good for me at least not as bad.

I started by finding a standard recipe, and as is often the case BBC good food came up trumps. Their recipe for Jam Roly-Poly comes out at 33oKcals a serving.

330Kcals? Huh. That doesn’t sound so bad, does it? Until you think it through…

They reckon you get six servings! Not in this house. Let’s start by assuming we get four servings. Then let’s include the calories from the custard the say to serve with. Now we’re at about 600Kcals… and we’re going to have enough for two meals’ worth of puddings each. Plus the fat content isn’t great at 27g a serving. Ouch.

The ingredients are basically: butter, flour, suet, milk, jam. So here’s my thinking on each…

Butter: This can be replaced with Flora Cuisine (other lower-fat cooking liquids are available).

Flour: There’s not much you can do about the calories in flour as far as I can tell. Gram flour, polenta, whatever: it’s all about the same it seems. So all I can think to do here is use wholemeal flour, so at least it’s more healthful.

Suet: I still want that suety stodginess, so I’m not just going to cut this out. Vegetable suet is slightly better than the beef stuff, so this is the obvious replacement.

Milk: Whole milk for 0% is the standard switch here: fewer calories, less fat, and still about the same calcium and other goodies.

Jam: I’m thinking I can just use a whole load of strawberries instead of jam. heat them up a bit and mash them down a bit… that’ll do, right? I’m worried I’ll miss some of the extra sugar in the jam. I considered using artificial sweetener, but I think I’ll try going for cinnamon spicing instead.

Finally there’s the custard. I’m going to replace this with banana (fake) ice cream. It’s just frozen banana blitzed in the food processor until it goes creamy. I can get have a whole banana’s worth in exchange for a small serving for custard, and it’s much lower in fat and much more healthful.

With the changes planned, I put it into a Google spreadsheet! Full details of the changes are in there, but here’s the summary:

To be honest… it’s not the huge saving I was looking for! Nine grams less fat is good, but it’s only about 70Kcals fewer :(

Plus… I haven’t actually made it yet, so I don’t know if it’s any good! I’ll make it at some point and let you know how it goes.