Keto baking disasters

(Pam) #1

I love to bake. MY daughter does also - we use it as sort of a bonding thing. We have tried several adventures into keto baking. We did some muffins that were not terrible. Her 15th birthday is Saturday and I really want to make her cupcakes - a cake - something. So I did a trail run of a keto cupcake recipe. This is the recipe I used - https://www.gnom-gnom.com/keto-chocolate-cupcakes/#wprm-recipe-container-10835

These turned out AWFUL. Both the cupcakes and the frosting. The cupcakes looked the same way coming out of the oven as they did going in. They were super dry and just…I don’t know…bad. And the buttercream was gritty no matter how much I mixed it and had an awkward taste.

I am not sure what I did wrong. Is there some super secret to gluten free/keto baking that I don’t know about? And assuming I cant get this recipe to work before Saturday - is there somewhere that sells keto baked goods?

(Full Metal KETO AF) #2

Gnom-gnom recipes are usually pretty good. On the grainy frosting, did you use powdered sweetener? Personally if you want quality sugar replacement Allulose is my go to. Dissolves well and has properties very close to regular cane sugar. It caramelizes, cooks into syrup, tastes like sugar but not quite as sweet so you need to taste when subbing it. You can try this recipe, I’ve made it several times and it’s easy and moist. It has zucchini and coconut flour. Inexpensive to make and I think you’ll be happy with it. Low Carb Yum is my favorite go to when I want to look for a KETO baking recipe. :man_cook:t3:

Hopefully you’ll get it sorted in time. :cowboy_hat_face:

(Pam) #3

I totally blame me and not the recipe. You know something has gone wrong when you pull cupcakes out of the oven and other than being warm and harder they are identical to when they went in. Did not rise at all or anything.

The sugar I used for the frosting was a powdered sugar sub. but right now the name of it escapes me. I do not have Allulose. I have Splenda, Stevia, and erythritol (but I don’t remember the brand name)

I will try again with the recipe you gave. Hopefully it will turn out better.

(Jane) #4

If you use Erithrytol it will be gritty.

Ditto what @David_Stilley said about Allulose - I finally broke down and bought some and it is the closest thing to sugar I’ve tried so far with similar properties - and no grit.

#5

I am quite sure keto cakes are even more about personal taste than normal ones. I tried out zillion recipes and tweaked even more several times in the last several years. I can never know if it will come out right even if I just change a great old recipe a little bit.
I know I should never attempt recipes with lots of coconut flour or not enough fat (but I avoid lots of added fat too so it’s tricky) but it’s usually a mystery what will happen. It’s good that a dry, bland stuff is edible if I pour enough chocolate on it so I never throw out baked desserts… But I try out new things in small amount (and have someone who eats ANY cake, almost no matter what). I must say, I still have only a handful good recipes but it’s enough.
I usually do sponge cakes or similar stuff, heavily based on eggs (10g flour type thing per egg, maybe, sometimes less but adding extra delicious nuts works), more yolks rarely hurt :wink: These are nice. Chocolate (sponge) cakes are the easiest as the tasty cocoa powder makes it work even when using some bland cheaper “flour” (I don’t use fancier flour but mix whatever I have, often use tasty walnuts and lots of good quality eggs so the result will be delicious). But maybe it’s me being a huge cocoa fan… My simplest chocolate cake is eggs, chocolate and a tiny bit mixed flour and it’s great (best if i use some walnuts but I am a huge walnut fan too). If we fancy some chocolate cake or just extra calories after a meal, I can do it in a few minutes, we always have homemade chocolate sauce to use in it. So if you ask me, chocolate cake is easy. Biscuits, on the other hand… I can’t do them.

(Dirty Lazy Keto'er, Sucralose freak ;)) #6

I’ve had a few. Baked a couple beautiful keto bricks last week :slightly_smiling_face: About 10,000 more, and we could build a nice new house :grinning: lol

(KCKO, KCFO 🥥) #7

Pam, use a coffee/spice grinder to make regular Swerve into powder sugar. I’m not big on sweets but Swerve done that way works in things I have tried. It gets super powdery.

If I were doing chocolate cupcakes I would try this one: https://www.ibreatheimhungry.com/chocolate-zucchini-cupcakes-w-mocha-frosting-low-carb/

You might want to make these “tortes” in a cupcake to turn them into cupcakes. Taffiny’s recipes are awesome http://www.ketocookingschool.com/blog/2018/7/28/dark-chocolate-espresso-torte

(Heather Meyer) #8

Just a piece of advice …most cake and cupcake recipes dont rise too much. Its due to the dense ingridents being used like almond flour and coconut flour.

(Jane) #9

How about give up the crutches of keto subs and go full clean keto?

Might be easier with the cravings but tougher with the willpower until you have conquered the carb monster

#10

Not a bad idea for many but what if I want cake? I don’t want carbs at all, never had carb cravings on keto except related to veggies/fruits when I seriously neglected them. I might not NEED cake but it’s nice to have some now and then, it has its uses.
I don’t actually want cakes myself at this point (I just want to make them sometimes, baking cakes and breads are my hobby, cooking too but baking is different), I ate sooooo much on low-carb and keto (I can’t bake carby cakes but low-carb and keto ones are easy enough for me) but I have circumstances so I kind of need to bake cakes. For a high-carber but I can’t and really want to bake carby ones as I mentioned so I make very low-carb ones. I have a relative with diabetes and I like to bake for her too (she bakes great stuff but still with lots of sugar and flour and it’s mostly for us, two people who gave up sugar ages ago… it’s way better if I make the baked goods, at least sometimes as I can’t keep her from baking completely). But when I was a beginner, cakes were pretty useful for me. Maybe it’s a two-edged sword and I don’t think people should rely on them unless their diet is too restricted or they need to do things more gradually or something. If it’s about eating keto cake or eating normal cake, one usually should choose the former, keto without desserts isn’t always an option. But that’s ideal, at least most of the time, I think that too.
I understand people who use cakes/desserts not as crutches, just as quite normal, nutritious, tasty food they want to keep forever (maybe occasionally, maybe frequently). Why not? We are different, with different goals, even on keto. As long it feels right for the person, I can’t see much problem with it.

So it’s a quite complex topic and everyone should think about their individual cases and decide if it’s worth it. But again, I agree, if someone can get away without using cakes, just eat (even more) normal keto food, it probably makes life simpler in most cases and one reaches their final destination, their final and hopefully ideal diet earlier.

(Bob M) #11

How is it for effects on your body? Any effect you can tell?

(Bob M) #12

I should say I’d like to make some cheesecake, and allulose would make it fairly nicely. I plan to sous vide it in jars, so I’d get a small hit of cheesecake during those times I need it. That’s not too often, but is every once in a while.

(Dirty Lazy Keto'er, Sucralose freak ;)) #13

I’ve had a couple flops, where I ended up with a brick, instead of a loaf :slight_smile: lol

Had an interesting screw up with my last bread baking though…
So my GF walks in and says, "What do you have the Almond Meal out for ? And so I told her, “That’s not Almond Meal, its ground Flaxseed”. So she says, “No, I don’t think so…” Well, as it turns out, she was right ! Oops ! So instead of flaxseed, the second most ingredient in my bread, I accidentally replaced it with Almond Meal ! Doh ! No wonder it seemed wetter, and stickier ? Ended up adding 1/4 cup more of oat fiber just to make it drier.
I had no idea how it would taste, but it actually rose okay. Ended up tasting different, but still quite good ! :slight_smile: The internal texture was nearly the same, but the skin seemed a little tougher. I’ll probably go back to the “correctly” recipe next time, but at least it wasn’t a complete waste of ingredients :slight_smile:

(Candy Lind) #14

I know this is an old thread, but there’s something crucial that was not mentioned so I thought I would chime in for anyone else who comes for info.

If your baking powder is old, THROW IT AWAY. Old baking powder spells disaster. In addition, buy baking powder that doesn’t contain aluminum. You have to use more baking powder in low-carb baking because the flours are heavier, and baking powders with aluminum will make them taste bitter.

#15

I was always very sensitive to the baking powder taste so I simply used a tiny fragment of the amount in the recipes and it worked so I was so uncertain WHY the recipes have a lot of it… Oh well, I use sodium bicarbonate in low-carb cakes and it works well. It still ruins the taste when overused, though… I prefer eggy cakes that don’t need such things at all :wink: But only if egg whites are involved as well, cakes with egg yolks usually can’t get away without it.

(Laurie) #16

It’s been years since I did any baking, but I used to make low-carb cheesecakes often. No flour. Always yummy.

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #17

Baking soda and baking powder are not quite the same thing. Baking soda is one of the ingredients of baking powder, which also includes an acid that will react with the soda when liquid is added. Baking powder goes stale after a while, because the humidity in the air causes the acid and the base to slowly react with each other. It is the carbon dioxide thrown off by the reaction of the acid with the base that leavens the batter. Recipes that call for baking soda instead of baking powder have to have an acid as one of the other ingredients, cream of tartar, or lemon juice, or something like that.

In yeast batters, the carbon dioxide is generated by the yeast as it feeds on the sugar in the recipe.

They probably call for more than absolutely necessary in order to compensate somewhat of any lack of freshness of the baking powder. Many cooks no longer bake often enough to use up their baking powder before it goes stale. And the taste is probably from the aluminium that many baking powders contain. There are brands on the market that are aluminium-free, however.

(Candy Lind) #18

Great summary of the chemistry! :+1:

#19

Speaking of baking disasters, this is more of a rant. It’s hard for me to trust a recipe writer who uses cups/volumes for quantity. How do I know how much a 1/2 cup of almond flour is: did you scoop it into the cup and level it off? What size pieces are the walnuts in the half cup listed? All too arbitrary in my opinion. Worse are the writers who just use a google conversation for the listed ingredients by volume without actually verifying the accuracy.

#20

My favorite is one cup zucchini or broccoli, actually… absolutely nonsensical, big chunks and why would I spend a lot of time to put them into a cup with all the variable amount of air? But walnuts are bad at it too, I experienced ground walnuts .have a not too strong correlation between volume and weight unlike most oily seeds…
I can’t imagine why cups would be any good but people use it and it can’t be helped. There are many better recipes and I need to add my personal modifications anyway so I don’t care so much about amounts. And as almost every baking recipe has almond flour, an unnecessary expensive item I refuse to ever use, I make my own recipes from scratch :smiley: Or based on my old recipes.
The almond flour is easier: of course it means the exact cup volume. 1 cup is 240-250ml (because why would we have the same standards, but the difference is tiny enough), that’s it. I saw recipes with one tablespoon but not the standard 15ml, just whatever they had, whatever heaped… So I had no idea if it was 15g or 42g…
So, find some more exact recipe, I never saw a single one that was worth to be upset about cups. Okay, once I searched to figure out about how much cheese is one cup but that’s it.
These unreliable cups are way worse in baking as doughs aren’t as tolerant with ratio changes as other dishes… So I understand the frustration, it’s just in the past for me already.