Welcome to this week’s edition of the Kos Diabetes Group! This time last year, I shared three favorite low-carb, diabetic-friendly recipes for making your winter holidays sweeter. Today I want to share another two: the first is an almond pound cake and the second are virtually guilt-free marshmallows! Let’s get started! As always, I recommend going to the original source link provided and reading the entire post, not skipping to the recipes. The author includes so many tips, tricks and suggestions for getting the best results and my retelling here is simply how I personally did it!
Two weeks ago, my son’s high school soccer team held their end-of-season party. The main course was catered, but families were assigned either an appetizer or a dessert to bring based on last name. Casa Brillig was Team Dessert. Now, my son isn’t really a dessert eater, so I wasn’t concerned with bringing something he’d eat… he may have had a cookie, but probably had a second plate of chicken instead! As diabetics, I’m pretty sure we ALL dread the dessert table, full of items we should NOT eat. I decided I wanted to bring something I’d enjoy, but I also didn’t want to use a lot of expensive keto/low-carb ingredients only to have people take one bite and discard it because it ‘didn’t taste right’. I decided on an almond cake, because with whipped cream and raspberries it would be both festive and tasty. I headed to my trusty favorite recipe site, All Day I Dream About Food, and came up with a recipe that suited all of my needs: easy to make, ingredients I already had at home as part of a low-carb pantry, and was billed as “perfect cake texture, with a fine crumb and a light, fluffy consistency”.
I brought it and… no one at all knew it was low-carb. NO ONE. Making my evening even better, as I went to get a piece from the nearly-empty plate, I heard someone say “I can’t, I eat keto” and faster than you can say “dessert” I politely said “Hey, the dessert I brought is keto if you want a piece” and I thought she was going to cry she was so happy. So I present to you this delicious Almond Flour Cake…
What’s you’ll need:
0.25 cup sliced almonds
3 cups almond flour (NOT almond meal)
0.3 cup whey or egg white protein powder
2.5 tsp baking powder
0.5 tsp salt
0.5 cup (1 stick) softened unsalted butter
0.75 cup erythritol-based sweetener
3 eggs
1 tsp almond extract
0.5 cup unsweetened almond milk or half heavy cream/half water
Steps:
1. Preheat your oven to 325F and butter your loaf pan well. Really well. I also put parchment paper on the bottom then buttered that. Make sure eggs and butter are room temperature.
2. Sprinkle the sliced almonds on the bottom and sides, pressing it into the butter to stick. See why you want it well-buttered?!
3. Stir together the almond flour, protein powder, baking powder and salt, make sure there are no clumps.
4. In a large bowl beat the butter until smooth, then add the sweetener and beat several minutes until lightened and well combined. I used a stand mixer but a hand mixer would probably do well too.
5. Add the eggs one at a time, then the almond extract. Scrape the bowl sides and bottom to make sure it’s all smooth and evenly combined.
6. Beat in half the dry ingredient mix, then your liquid (I used heavy cream/water because I didn’t have almond milk handy), then the rest of the dry ingredients. CAREFULLY spread into the pan being careful not to knock off all those nuts you pressed into the sides! Smooth out the top (which eventually will be the bottom of the cake)
7. Bake 50-60 minutes until the top is golden brown and the top is just firm to the touch. Take out and cool for 30 minutes, then flip it out onto a rack to finish cooling. Note: Waiting 30 minutes but not letting it cool completely in the pan made ALL the difference getting it out cleanly. Who knew?!
Slice and serve either on its own or with whipped cream and berries. I’m sure it keeps for a while in a covered container but it only lasted two days at our house!
Nutritional info per serving (based on my recipe calculator and 12 servings), yours will vary based on what you use for ingredients:
303 calories; 25g fat; 6g total carbs; 3g fiber; 9g protein.
Moving on to our second recipe… Have you ever looked at what’s in a bag of ‘sugar-free’ marshmallows? Once you get over the sticker shock (often $0.50 per marshmallow!), you’ll often see maltitol (which spikes blood sugar in many diabetics) or xylitol (forbidden in our house because we have a dog, and it’s incredibly toxic to them). I wanted to have marshmallows for my hot cocoa (cocoa, safe sweetener, and either almond milk or heavy cream/water)! The regular sugar marshmallows my friend makes taste delicious and aren’t as hard to make as I always assumed, so I went looking for a recipe and found this one. I’ve made these a bunch of times and they ALWAYS come out amazing. The only caveat I will give in advance is you can’t toast them like store-bought regular ones… they melt instead of toast. But if that doesn’t bother you and you’ve got a stand mixer OR a hand mixer plus a helper, read on…
What you’ll need:
1 cup water
2.5 Tbs Gelatin (NOT collagen!). Original recipe says if you use Knox, you’ll need less.
2/3 cup erythritol-based sweetener
2/3 cup Bocha, Allulose or Xylitol
1/8 tsp cream of tartar
pinch salt
1 tsp peppermint, vanilla or other extract (vanilla is traditional but we REALLY like peppermint best)
parchment/waxed paper-lined pan, I used an 8x8 to get thick marshmallows
Candy/other thermometer measuring to 240F
Steps:
1. Line your pan with parchment or waxed paper, then lightly oil/grease.
2. Pour 0.5 cup of your water into your mixing bowl and sprinkle the gelatin over the top.
3. Add remaining 0.5 cup water, sweeteners, cream of tartar and salt to a saucepan and bring to a boil; stir to dissolve sweetener. I used a clip-on candy thermometer and attached that, you also can use an instant read one and keep dipping it in.
4. Boil until it reaches 237-240F (this will take a while) then remove from heat.
5. Turn mixer on low and add hot syrup to the gelatin by slowly pouring it down the side of the bowl. I quickly scraped the sides to make sure all the gelatin was in the hot syrup.
6. Add your flavor extract, turn the mixer to medium high and beat until it’s lukewarm, white, and thick. It was VERY obvious when it went from ‘frothy sweet gelatin’ to ‘looks like almost-meringue’, and took about ten minutes.
7. Quickly get the mixture into your prepared pan! If you accidentally miss your pourability window, I’m told you can gently reheat the mixture and beat it again. I decided I didn’t care about visuals enough to do that.
8. Let sit a few hours, until the top isn’t sticky. Turn out onto a cutting board and cut into mallows, whatever size you want. I coated them in powdered sweetener at this point. Then let them sit overnight to dry out a bit, and store in a covered container.
Nutrition info: The ENTIRE recipe is 130 calories; ~30g protein; and 1g carbs. So enjoy virtually guilt-free!
That’s it for me today! I have two other recipes I wanted to make but either ran out of time for, or am not making until closer to our holiday dinner. The first is a low-carb rendition of Christmas Crack (aka Saltine Toffee Chocolate cookies), and the other will be my own adaptation of a NYT recipe for a cranberry curd tart. If they happen and turn out well, I’ll share them at another time!
What are YOU making?