posted 3 years ago
Someone who knows passed on to me the best carrot cake recipe in the world, and so I made some for my birthday. Special occasions are the only times we'll have white sugar in the house. So I went ahead and made the original recipe. 500g of icing sugar (or powdered or whatever they call it in your country) in the recipe. Yikes, that's over a pound of bleepity-bleeping white sugar going into our bodies, I keep thinking as I'm rolling around a scrumptious morsel of it in my mouth.
I actually doctored up the cake part a little bit to make it healthier because I can't stop myself from doing those things, but I really couldn't think of a way to make the a workable, delicious cake frosting without icing/powdered sugar.
But I want to "health up" the recipe so I might think about having this more than once a year. If I could really get it ketoed or paleoed up, I would be really thrilled.
So this frosting will have cream cheese, butter, powdered vanilla bean and ... ???
I will probably sweeten mostly with ground, dried stevia leaves. This will turn it very green, which is not my goal, but stevia in leaf form is much healthier and cheaper than the white powdered processed stuff you buy in supermarkets. The frosting probably needs something added for texture, as the icing sugar seems to add volume, and smooth and thin the mixure out. And sugar is also a preservative that I suppose helps keep the frosting and the cake fresh and edible for a few days. I may throw in some coconut sugar to take the stevia-y edge off the taste, I can live with a bit of that. That will turn it brown, so who knows how the color will turn out! Probably still quite green though. I might take advantage of this and add some turmeric to the cake mix to make it bright orange for contrast.
And then for the cake part, I suppose I could try a combo of almond, coconut, quinoa and buckwheat flours to substitute for the whole-wheat flour in the recipe too. That would be the keto version, not sure how paleo folks address the idea of a cake or how you might paleo it up. I know maybe making a cake runs contrary to the actual spirit of paleo in the first place, but orthodoxy aside, I'm wondering if I could make something that scratches my cake itch in a somewhat paleo-friendly way. I do like going back to the most basic or ancient ingredients possible without stopping having fun in life, ha, ha...
Anyway, has anyone ever attempted anything like this? Any advice or secret ingredients? Any failed or successful experiments that might inform my efforts?
Long balcony garden in the green Basque Country