Choco Squares Flax Cereal

Cereal for breakfast is a real miracle on the ketogenic diet.  For one, if you are not a morning person, it means getting an extra 30 minutes of sleep when you have morning commitments because it is storable and easy to put together morning-of.  It also means a break from scrambled eggs.  For Tristan, it is a real treat.

My fruity flax loops recipe was a big hit with Tristan and the blog as well (although still a dearth of comments!) based on views, but it was exhausting to make.  This recipe rectifies the labor-intensiveness of the last recipe by making a sheet of squares and utilizes the greatness of double cream to make the perfect breakfast!

Ingredients:

Cereal:

80 g ground flaxseed

30 g egg white

25 g melted butter

5 g Cadbury's cocoa

4 g truvia

50 g water (approximately)

Milk:

75 g Alpro unsweetened almond milk

50 g double cream (50.5% fat)

Combine ground flaxseed, egg white, melted butter, cocoa, truvia, and water in a bowl, mixing until combined.  You may need more or less water based on climate (from my experience).  Use the amount you need for the dough to be fully moistened but still a dough-like consistency.

Spread the dough thinly on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper.  The easiest and least messy way to do this is to spread it between two layers of parchment paper.  Oh the wonders of parchment paper!

Using a butter knife, score lines into the dough, making squares.

If you want to be done in a hurry, bake at 350 F (175 C) for about 20 minutes.  Be aware that if you want it crunchy, you run the risk of over-toastiness!  The more patient among us should give it a try baking at 150 F (65 C) until crispy which will keep away any chance of burning, but be high enough to fully cook the egg in the dough.

Serve with cream/almond 'milk'.

fat:  81.9 g, protein:  20 g, carb:  3 g

ratio:  3.6:1 (heck yeah!)

Note:  Despite chocolate being a pretty strong flavor, the overwhelming taste here is still flax.  If you can afford more carbs or a lower ratio, you can try adding more cocoa - no promises!  I also tried using cinnamon and vanilla as the flavor instead of cocoa, which Tristan liked equally well (still tasted like flax) so a good alternative for someone who doesn't like chocolate - like me!

Chocolate!

I love chocolate. Everyone does.

Well, I suppose Samantha doesn't. She likens its taste to that of 'burnt dirt', a flavour we are of course all familiar with.

Unfortunately for me though, normal person chocolate contains way too much sugar for someone on my diet, so while on the road I was without the dirty burnt tasting goodness for months.

Once settled in one place, we searched the web and found some stevia and erythritol-sweetened chocolate made by New York based Lucienne's.

Stevia, produced from the leaves of the stevia plant, is a carb-free sweetener in its pure form.  Erythritol has only about 1/20th the carbs of sugar and is therefore not too shabby either. Chocolate itself is not devoid of carbohydrate, so no bar will never be carb-free, however as a rule, the darker the chocolate (these are 83%) the less carbs it will contain.

Based on our estimations, each square has 0.5 g carb, 0.5 g protein and 2 g fat, adding up to a decent 2:1 ratio. Most importantly though, despite being a bit more bitter than what I would usually choose, all three flavours (mint, orange, regular) are really, really tasty, with orange currently the marginal favourite. The cocoa content is high, but you tend to appreciate a more intense chocolate hit when you're only allowed a couple of squares every few days!

Stevia has been slow to enter the European market, so these or similar chocolates are relatively hard to find over here, with shipping from the US tending to be on the expensive side. Luckily, Samantha seem to have her eye on a bag of cocoa butter at the local health food shop, so with my Lucienne's supplies running short I'm hoping we'll see a chocolate bar recipe on here sometime soon.

Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream

ice cream after a night in the freezer

Ice cream, emphasis on the cream, sounded like the perfect keto dessert, but as soon as I began to read up on it, I got worried.  As it turns out, regular ice cream is not made entirely from cream, and copious amounts of sugar are actually what give it its creaminess.  

I decided to give a shot anyway, and what a success!  It does freeze up quite hard but not impenetrable, and straight out of the ice cream maker it has a lovely soft-serve texture.

I had also read that because it can freeze up hard and quick, free standing ice cream makers just weren't up to the task.  It was no match, however, for the motor on my kitchenaid mixer with ice cream freezer attachment.  I highly recommend it if you're serious about making ice cream!

My first flavor choice was mint chocolate chip because I thought mint was the perfect mask for the aftertaste of sugar replacements.  The addition of chocolate contributes significant carbs, so a basic vanilla ice cream would drop the carb count even lower!  I have big plans for this ice cream making formula, so expect to see more in the future.

Ingredients:

480 g (2 cups) 40% heavy whipping cream

45 g truvia

5 g vanilla

60 g unsweetened almond milk

76 g (about 4) egg yolk
5 g pure mint extract

20 g coconut oil

7 g cocoa powder

Combine 1 cup cream, truvia, vanilla, and mint in a small saucepan and heat slowly on a low heat.

Combine remaining 1 cup cream and almond milk in a separate bowl.

In another separate bowl, whisk egg yolks.  Add steaming cream to the egg yolk in small amounts, whisking, to temper the eggs.  

Add tempered eggs to the saucepan, and cook the custard until it becomes thick and reaches about 160 F.

*If you are not an experienced custard maker (like me) you may end up with some bits of cooked egg in your custard.  Do not fret!  Take your custard off the heat, and pour through a strainer to remove the bits of cooked egg.  It is likely due to bits of egg white that made it in with your yolks.

Add reserved cream and almond milk to the cooked custard and refrigerate overnight to fully chill.

Pour into your ice cream maker as directed and remember that it will freeze up faster than normal ice cream.

To give it little flecks of chocolate, melt coconut oil and stir in cocoa powder to create a pourable chocolate syrup which you then drizzle into the ice cream maker near the end of the ice cream making process.

makes 7, 100 g servings:

fat:  33 g, protein:  3.3 g, carb:   2.9 g

ratio:  5.5:1

Tristan gets 85 g for dessert, and he says it is his favorite yet!

Edit:  I came back to this recipe to make more ice cream for Tristan, as he has been looking forward to this the whole trip, and I realized I forgot to include the mint!  Oops!