Low Carb Indulgence

I got two pounds of xylitol at the beginning of June, and I've been having fun playing with it to see how best to use it.  It's pretty neat, in that it can be measured cup for cup with regular sugar, and it has a lot of the same properties as sugar, too.  As with most sugar alcohols, you have to be careful with how much you eat or you could get an upset stomach, but the threshold is mush higher for xylitol.  Plus, xylitol is actually good for tooth health.

One of my favorite uses for it so far has been ice cream.  Yes, ice cream.  You can go buy CarbSmart low carb ice cream from Breyers if you're really craving it, but I always feel weird about the ten mile long ingredient list it sports, and your only choices for flavor are chocolate and vanilla.

I actually have been making ice cream for a while.  I have a nice KitchenAid mixer, and bought an ice cream maker attachment for it.  It works very well.  But when we went low carb, that seemed pretty much out of the question.  You may be asking, why didn't I just replace the sugar with stevia or something similar.  Well, that's simple.  The thing that makes ice cream soft and creamy is.... sugar.  Without sugar, your ice cream turns into ice, and no one likes rock hard ice cream.

However, as I said earlier, xylitol has many of the same properties as sugar, so I knew I wanted to try using it for ice cream at least once!

I ended up using this recipe from Food.com.  And it was delicious!!  If no one told you, you'd think it was normal sugary ice cream.

While I still had ice cream, I also decided to try a chocolate sauce recipe with xylitol.  Chocolate is a finicky creature.  It's very hard to do sugar free chocolate unless you use a sugar alcohol to sweeten it.  Stevia and Splenda both make chocolate taste incredibly bitter no matter how much sweetener you add.  I've had a recipe on hand for a while that I've been meaning to use.  I'd like to link to it, but I can't find the link anywhere, so here instead is the recipe!  If anyone can figure out where this recipe is from, let me know and I'll put it up here.

Sugar Free Chocolate Sauce
3 oz unsweetened chocolate (not cocoa powder)
2 tsp butter
1/2 c cream
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
6 tbsp xilitol
Pinch stevia
4-6 tsp water

Powder xylitol with stevia in food processor.  Melt chocolate and butter in double broiler, stirring until smooth.  Stir in cream and sweetener slowly, and whisk until smooth.  Remove from heat and add vanilla, and enough water for the right consistency.  Pour into container and store in the fridge.

OMG, I have to tell you that the chocolate sauce is soooo good.  It will be runny at first, but once you stick it in the fridge, it thickens up nicely.  I'm thinking about altering the recipe to make it into fudge.  Maybe remove the water and reduce the cream just a little.

And together?  Now that's heaven.

Low-Carb Peanut Butter Cookies

This is a repost of something I wrote on tumblr last year, but I love this recipe and had to reshare on my new blog.

Ever have a craving for COOKIES?!  Yeah, me too.  But the problem with low carb cookie recipes is that they usually call for weird ingredients that are either hard to find, super expensive, or leave you wondering if they’re actually good for you.

These cookies have exactly four ingredients, and I bet you have them all in your cupboard right now!
 
Low Carb Peanut Butter Cookies
16 oz (2 cups) smooth peanut butter
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
5-10 packets stevia (or to taste)* OR
1-2 cups granual Splenda or other sweetener that measures cup-for-cup with sugar*

Preheat the oven to 350.  Mix all ingredients well.  It will be really runny at first, but keep mixing and it will form a dough!  Now, if you’re not weirded out by the thought of eating raw eggs, you should taste the dough.  Is it sweet enough?  It should be slightly sweeter than you would actually want the cookies, because it goes though some changes in the oven that make them taste a little less sweet.

Roll the cookies into 1 inch balls or so, place onto ungreased sheet, and then press with a fork to flatten.  You should get about 32-36 cookies.

Place in the oven for 12-14 minutes, or until just starting to turn golden around the bottom edge.  Remove from the oven and LET COOL FOR 10 MINUTES.  The cookies are very soft until cooled and shouldn’t be handled.  After cooled, they’re still pretty crumbly, but they’re so freakin’ good!

*The reason I give such a wide variation on how much sweetener to use is because everyone on the low-carb diet has different sweetness thresholds.  Try it with the lower amount first, and if that doesn't taste right to you, add more!  Remember that it should be sweeter than you want it when it's raw, because they get less sweet after baking. 

Nutrition facts fore one cookie:

If you make 32 cookies total:
Calories: 100; Fat: 8.5g; Protein: 4.5g; Carbs: 3.1g; Fiber: 1g; Net Carbs: 2.1g

If you make 36 cookies total:
Calories: 89; Fat: 7.6g; Protein: 4g; Carbs: 2.8g; Fiber: .9g; Net Carbs: 1.9g

————————————————————————————————

I did a little experimenting tonight on these.  As I was whipping up the delicious cookies, hubby said, “If you could make ganache with dark chocolate and cream…” and suddenly images of low carb chocolate covered peanut butter cookies filled my head.  So I sent him to the store while I baked (i.e. sat on the couch waiting for the cookies to finish).  When he got home, I tried making ganache from memory.  Unfortunately, my memory sucks, and I ended up separating the chocolate, and not being able to get it emulsified again.
So instead of throwing away delicious Lindt 85% dark chocolate, I just kind of plopped the separated mess onto the cookies and stuck them in the freezer.  Several minutes later, we pulled them out, and OMG SO GOOD.  They’re very intense, and we could only eat one even though they’re small, but it was so amazingly satisfying.  I’m certainly going to try this again on a day when I’m more competent!

Update 5/26/13: I have indeed tried these with a proper ganache, and they are excellent.  Keep them in the fridge though or they'll be a sticky mess pretty quickly. 

Low Carb Deep Dish Chocolate Chip Cookies!

Phew.  That's a long name for a recipe.

Kind of on a whim the other day, I bought some dark chocolate chips (Ghirardeli's 60% cacao; not as dark as I'd like it, but better than Hershey's special "dark").  Chad recently bought me Cooking With Coconut Flour and also Wheat Belly Cookbook, and I knew both had recipes for chocolate chip cookies in them! 

So yesterday, feeling kind of crazy hungry for chocolate chip cookies all of a sudden, I dug through both books to see what they called for.  The Wheat Belly cookbook calls for 4(!!) cups of almond flour, and I only had maybe 1 1/2 cup ground at the moment.  The coconut flour book was better; however almost all of the coconut flour recipes call for sugar.  I've tried substituting stevia in the past, but unfortunately, the sugar is essential for getting the properties of a cookie.  Anyway, this recipe called for a minimum of 1/2 cup of sugar, and I knew that with the chocolate chips added, it was going to be a carb bomb by the time I was done.  I'll probably try this recipe in the future, when I feel like I have some wiggle room carb wise, but for now I just put it away.

After that disappointment, I hit up Linda's Low Carb, my favorite low carb recipe site.  I like it because Linda personally tries every recipe and then rates and comments on them all.  Well, unfortunately, I didn't see ANY chocolate chip cookies in her recipes. 

I was feeling really desperate for cookies at this point, so I just punched in "low carb chocolate chip cookies" into google and hoped for the best.  Most of the results were ok, but included ingredients that I don't have on hand or would rather not use (like DaVinci syrups or protein powder). 

But there was one gem amongst the others.  It was... so beautiful.  A deep dish cookie, mixed and cooked in a bowl in the microwave.  More like a beautiful cookie cake than an actual cookie.

Low Carb Deep Dish Chocolate Chip Cookies

I remember Linda at Linda's Low Carb saying that she's successfully substituted almond flour for ground flax seed, so I used 1/4 cup of almond flour instead of 1/8 each almond flour and flax seed.  I also used butter instead of coconut oil because I <3 butter.  Who doesn't? 

This baby is big, though.  If you make it, plan on counting it as a large part of your meal, or maybe share it with a friend.  Since Chad's not eating anything sweet of any kind (except for fruit and chocolate), I had to eat it all by myself.  Not that I'm complaining!