I occasionally bake for my co-workers and those lucky enough to have offices near ours. It keeps me in practice and I get to make stuff that sounds especially yummy. When I’m not eating keto I love beer, well, even when I am eating keto I love beer I just try really really hard to drown my sorrows in whisky in its various forms, but I digress…
I really wanted to post the pictures of my recent strawberry-jam-making adventure but figured I ought to do another keto friendly recipe first. We had some good friends over for supper in June and it was a completely keto friendly menu (except for the quantity of wine of course).
yep, that’s a huge hunk of meat
Toby made this huge prime rib roast and stuffed mushroom caps:
before cookingafter baking…and uhm, some had been eaten
Also cheese covered summer squash, oh yea, and that prime rib thing:
arty cooking picture
But here I am supposed to be talking about the dessert!
Toby found this recipe on a website called All Day I Dream About Food and it seemed too good to be true. Let me tell you, it is pretty damn good.
This (plus cocoa powder) will be cake…
As it was the first time I was trying the recipe I tried to follow it as closely as possible, well, except the part about melting the chocolate in the microwave. We don’t have one!
chocolate base
Chocolate, almond flour, walnuts, eggs, fake sugar, butter and vanilla all met together to form the brownie base of the cake.
All baked. Seriously, my baking posts are kinda lame when they amount to “I followed the recipe” but still neat to see what the final product looks like made at home I think.
after it was released from the pan
And uhm, there was much wine and talking and I forgot to take a picture of the cake after it had chilled until it was almost all gone
Served with a dollop of whipped cream:
It definitely makes it easier to change your approach to eating when you can eat stuff like this. Especially with good friends.
Toby had some friends over poker the other day. He was going to make the mac and cheese he made for the open house – it uses something like two-and-a-half pounds of shredded cheese! It was amazingly yummy (and yea, completely off the keto-plan).
I asked what he’d like me to bake. He thought about it and decided on shortbread and biscotti; two of my staples. I decided to try a new recipe for the shortbread, rather than the usual Cook’s Illustrated one I usually do. So I opened up our cookbook book shelves and pulled out In the Sweet Kitchen.
cook book cupboard
I love making shortbread – the end result is usually pretty crowd pleasing without a lot of ingredients.
this will be shortbread
So Toby bought that butter. It’s awesome. Seriously, far superior to any of the supermarket brands. It’s pricey – $7 at St. Lawrence Market – but worth it for things like shortbread where the butter really shines.
Ingredients:
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup rice flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 pound butter – room temperature but not soft
1 cup super-fine sugar.
Okay, about the sugar – you really don’t want to use regular granulated sugar. I think it makes a difference. But you don’t have to go buy any special sugar. Just modify your regular stuff.
regular granulated sugar
Take your regular granulated sugar and put it in a coffee grinder. We have one that we only use for food prep.
After going through the coffee grinder
Can you see the difference? Far smaller crystals. It’s much finer and feels softer.
Whip the butter and the sugar together:
Then add in the flours and salt and prepare for baking. For this time I lined 2 9×9 baking pans with parchment paper and split the dough evenly between the two. The cookbook says it should fill 3 8×8 pans – but it worked okay with the 2 9x9s. I wouldn’t have wanted them any thinner than they were.
the dough before it went into the oven
The cookies went into the oven for 30-35 minutes at 325f. I took them out at about the half-way point to score them into cookies. It makes it so much easier to cut them into cookies when they’re baked. The only advice I can give is to wait until the tops really have changed colour – they get a bit golden. I took these ones out a little early I think.
Sprinkle with sugar and then let cool a little. They were a big hit with the guys and it’s a good thing I snuck a few out to send to a friend before they came as there were only 2 left on Sunday!
I have, on occasion, made treats for my office mates. I came up with some sort of order for everyone to pick a treat. Most recently the choice was “plain chocolate cake; you know, the kind that’s dense inside and has a bit of a crisp outside.” So that was my task. And what I found was Cook’s Illustrated Simple Chocolate Sheet Cake.
List of ingredients:
3/4 cup cocoa powder, preferably Dutch-processed
1 1/4 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon table salt
8 ounces semisweet chocolate, chopped
12 tablespoons unsalted butter (1 1/2 sticks), plus extra for baking pan
4 large eggs
1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup buttermilk
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
Okay – as an aside – I really wish magazines and cookbooks would use both cups AND weight measures. Weight measures are so much more accurate than cups and spoons. Sigh.
This will be chocolate cake…
Set the oven to 325f; grease a 9×13 baking pan with butter and set aside.
Sift the cocoa, flour and salt together and set aside. The recipe says to melt the butter and chocolate in the microwave. We don’t have a microwave so I used a pot over another pot on the stove.
separate mixings all together
You can see the pot of chocolate and butter in the pot of water getting ready to melt. The blue bowl in the back has the cocoa, flour and salt. The other bowl has the eggs, sugar and vanilla that had been whisked together.
Once the chocolate and butter was melted, I whisked them into the egg mixture. Then the buttermilk and baking soda were added:
Then the dry ingredients were added and it was all dumped into the baking pan:
mmmm chocolate
Okay, here it is ready to go in the oven:
35 minutes later and:
cake
I’ll let you know what my co-workers thought of it. No one ate it here on the day it was made because we had this huge burger and poutine dinner 😉 Toby snuck in a small piece – he thought it was an absolutely fine chocolate cake, not wonderful, it was just chocolate cake. Which is what I was going for I guess so there you go.
Well, it finally happened – Toby found a recipe he wanted me to try over at The Frugal LowCarber: Chocolate Almond Meal Cake.
This will be cake
The yellow-y stuff is ground almonds. I mentioned to some of the people at work who tried the cake that maybe next time I’ll grind the almonds a little finer. The ones I used are just the regular ground almonds from the bulk food store (I <3 Bulk Barn). They all said no – they liked the texture of them. Hmmm have to think about that.
Splenda and cocoa powder
One of the things you do not eat when eating keto is sugar. Like at all. So I’ve had to wrap my head around eating splenda and swerve (erythritol). I spent a lot of time avoiding “processed” stuff – and splenda to me = processed. But if I want to bake more often then that’s what I’m gonna do. Good thing Costco sells these huge bags of splenda (which weigh next to nothing)
It’s a great recipe, easy to follow and clear. I didn’t change anything so I highly recommend you go over to the Frugal LowCarber. This is my first recipe of her’s that I’ve tried. I’ll definitely go back for more.
About to go in the oven
Have I mentioned how much I love my oven? I really need to get on the house-hunting, moving in, reno posts!
All done and waiting to cool (at least a little) much to Toby’s chagrin.
Bonus points to anyone who recognizes the logo on the plate 😉
So Q had just gotten up from his nap when this was cool enough to eat so he and Toby were my taste-testers. Toby had a bite and I could tell he wasn’t sure. It definitely doesn’t taste like “chocolate cake” but it definitely tastes like “chocolate almond cake.”
Q watched Toby have some and he opened his mouth all sleepy and dopey like. He took a bite of the piece I held up and ate it. I asked him how it was. Q, is it yummy? Do you like it? Q’s response? He opened his mouth for more. I’ll count that as a win.
And here’s the final result:
