My new baking secret!

Unbleached, unrefined whole cane sugar is my new baking secret!
I have been looking for substitutions for refined sugar in our diet. We use raw honey a lot, but in baking, sometimes it makes for a denser product. I've yet to find a way to cook with stevia. It's great in drinks (1/2 a packet in grape kombucha is to DIE for!) but it just doesn't sub well for sugar. Rapadura is so hard to find and very expensive. Turbinado sugar is a nice sub for refined, but the grains are very large. You either have to disolve it all in water or pulverize it in the food processor.

So one day I stumbled across whole cane sugar and decided to give it a try. The price was very reasonable and I was quite pleased with the results!
Upon opening the product, it looks like a bag of dirt!

But then you get a lovely light molasses smell and it produces a very nice caramel flavor in your baked goods. You use it cup for cup as you would sugar.
In making this product, the milled cane stalks are composted, not burned. They go on to cooking which separates the sugars from the cane. Once filtered, it is dried and ground. The molasses is not separated from the sugar. And yes, this still is cane sugar, but the molasses contained in it provides many minerals vital to our diet. One tsp. of this product give you 11% of your RDA of iron! It also contains vitamin C, potassium, magnesium, copper, and manganese.
So if you are looking to cut refined sugar from your diet, I think this is a really good alternative. It's sure to be a staple around here!