So my parents are in town, mainly to see my son, I'm just an added bonus. After dinner tonight we were chatting over a wonderful dessert (see more on this later) and my mother just happened to mention that she knew I was busy because I hadn't blogged in a while :) I apologize for my absence, but aside from work and being a mom, I've been very busy many nights (mostly in procrastination of doing paperwork), trying and creating gluten free, sugar free recipes. A very dear friend of mine (Kat, you know who you are!) is on a very strict diet that has her exclude both of these things plus eggs and yeast, so to be a good friend (and because I love to bake) I took her new restrictions as a learning opportunity for myself (see my previous post on going gluten free). Having a ever-present, although diminished, sweet-tooth, I've been wanting for a while to eliminate processed sugar from my life. So the stars seemed to have aligned. I checked out a bunch of books from the library and started doing some research on the internet. There is whole world out there devoted to healthy, sugar free baking in addition to the recipes I had already found for gluten free cooking.
Many of the recipes I tried use brown rice sugar, agave, or honey as a sugar substitute, but I've also started using Stevia, they have different flavors that are fun to try. My favorite new recipes have been for ice cream. Yes, ice cream without sugar!! My favorite recipes mix coconut milk with almond milk and dark cocoa powder. I've also used hemp milk with almond milk; it was good, but not my favorite (hemp milk also has more calories). I've been playing with a variety of different gluten free flours mixed with stevia to create cookies. The texture is a bit cakey, but they are still pretty good (and passed the husband taste test, same goes for the ice creams).
As for dessert tonight...it passed the husband test AND the parent test. I made a gluten free sugar free (with the exception of the sugar in the chocolate chips, but you can use carob chips). It was a variation on Mud Pie. The recipe called for using graham crackers to make a crust, but I used gluten free ginger snaps because I couldn't find gluten free graham crackers. For the ice cream and chocolate syrup, I used dark cocoa powder to replace the instant espresso because I can't do caffeine at night. I used almond milk when the recipe called for non-dairy milk. http://www.chefchloe.com/blog/2-blog/38-mahalo-mud-pie.html
I'm very hopeful that the reduction in sugar in my life will help with my skin because I'm growing wearing....look for a future blog on how I'm going to cut way back on my coffee intake, which is also supposed to help with acne.
Let me know if you have any questions about gluten-free, sugar-free baking and cooking.
Happy Baking!
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