Category Archives: Desserts - Page 2

Happy Mother’s Day! with Hot Chocolate

Posted by on May 8, 2011 25 comments

Our best wishes to all Moms!

We thought we’d post something kids and moms can enjoy together: hot chocolate.

Hot Chocolate

We recommend some combination of whole milk or heavy cream, dark chocolate, and coconut milk or coconut oil.

We like ours thick so we used cream and coconut oil. (Shou-Ching suggests mixing some coffee with the cream — for Mom only! (Paul suggests some Irish whiskey.)) We used 72% chocolate, which is sweet but not too sweet.

We mixed about 100 g chocolate with a heaping tablespoon (~2 tbsp) coconut oil and 1 cup cream. Melt the chocolate with the oil in a sauce pan:

Then add the cream or milk and stir until well mixed:

Whipped Cream

It wouldn’t be hot chocolate without whipped cream on top. We use 1 cup heavy whipping cream and 1 tbsp rice syrup as a sweetener.

We do the preparation in the same plastic container we’ll use to store the extra whipped cream – less cleanup that way:

Whip the cream, then add the rice syrup and whip some more:

Serve

Transfer everything to a mug and top with cinnamon or nutmeg:

Happy Mother’s Day everyone!

Coconut Bark

Posted by on March 6, 2011 46 comments

Kindy’s son Matthias is on a ketogenic diet and she has been looking for ways to make coconut oil tasty:

I am trying to add coconut oil in every place I can think of but this is harder to do than one would think.  I want him to take 4 – 6 tablespoons a day so I can up his carbs a bit …

I am trying ‘hot chocolate’: heavy whipping cream, coconut oil, cocoa-plain, drop of stevia.  He likes it but will only take a few drinks before he is ‘full’.

Others have also asked for ways to make coconut oil palatable – for instance, Ian.

A lot of Paleo dieters have recommended coconut bark. So we thought we’d give it a try.

Ingredients

We tried several different combinations of ingredients; all of them worked well. This seems a fairly fool-proof dessert.

The basic ingredients are:

1)      coconut oil,

2)      cocoa powder or chocolate,

3)      nuts or nut butter, and

4)      a carbohydrate.

We prefer low-omega-6 nuts, and low-fructose “safe starches” and sweeteners such as rice syrup or stevia. We do eat fruits and berries, but generally avoid any other sources of sucrose or fructose.

For our coconut bark experiments, we tried macadamia nuts and almond butter as our nuts, and puffed rice and figs as our carb sources. Here are a few of the ingredients we used — puffed rice, unsweetened cocoa powder, 72% chocolate, and almond butter:

For a more ketogenic (therapeutic) bark, increase the coconut oil and decrease the carbs; for a more dessert-like flavor, add more carbs.

OK, here’s what we did. I would characterize these as dessert-like and only mildly ketogenic.

Chocolate, macadamia nuts, almond butter, puffed rice

Ingredients for this version (we used rather more coconut oil than is shown here):

Preparation is very simple. First, mix the ingredients over a low heat. We melted the coconut oil first, then melted chocolate:

Then we mixed in the almond butter and ground macadamia nuts, followed by the puffed rice:


Next, pour the mixture onto a shallow aluminum-foil covered plate, and put in the refrigerator or freezer to cool. We put them in the refrigerator for ten minutes, then sliced the bark into pieces while it was still soft, and then moved it to the freezer for ten minutes to finish:


Chocolate, macadamia nuts, almond butter, figs, raisins, cocoa powder

This differed from the previous mix only in that diced figs and raisins replaced the puffed rice, and the finished bark pieces were dipped in cocoa powder. Ingredients:

Freshly poured onto the plate:

Cooled and sliced:

Served:

Conclusion

Coconut bark is not very nourishing, micronutrient-wise, but it is tasty and it does supply the ketogenic fats of coconut oil.

I suppose one could mix in ketogenic amino acids, like leucine or lysine, to make the bark even more ketogenic.

Ketogenic dieters shouldn’t suppose that they need to exclude all carbs. The body needs a little bit of glucose, and the bark will still be ketogenic if the coconut oil content is high enough.

Ice Cream

Posted by on February 20, 2011 58 comments

I thought I’d show how we make ice cream these days. It’s an easy dessert to make, and great for kids. They may even help in the cleanup by licking the utensils!

We’ve adopted rice syrup as a sweetener lately. The nice thing about “safe starch” syrup is that the dessert can be made as sweet as one likes, without the health concerns of fructose. With sucrose, I felt obliged to minimize the sweetness.

We’ve also begun to use lemon juice in a lot of our cooking, since the citrate offers a number of health benefits. We’ve come to like the citrus flavor and fragrance in our ice cream too.

With these innovations, our basic formula for ice cream is:

  • 2 cups (1 pint) heavy cream. Ideally, the cream should be free of carrageenan, skim milk, or other additives, as discussed in this thread.
  • 6 egg yolks
  • 2 tablespoons rice syrup (more can be drizzled on when it’s done to accommodate those with a sweet tooth)
  • 1 lemon (juice and some meat)
  • berries, nuts, and other flavorings to taste

Today we made blueberry ice cream.

Some ingredients:

In the blender, before and after:

The ice cream maker:

This has a neat design: the pot that holds the ice cream is frozen beforehand (which requires 48 hours), and it mounts on a motor and turns. The rest of the ice cream maker is stationary; a stationary paddle churns the mixture as the pot turns.

Here we are pouring in the mixture:

And 15 minutes later it’s done:

And served:

Shou-Ching is the one with the sweet tooth!

UPDATE: Calorie Counts

For those concerned with such things, here’s the calorie breakdown of the ice cream:

Ingredient Carbs Fat Protein
Rice syrup, 2 tbsp 150
Blueberries, 2 cups 170
Egg yolks, 6 246 12
Cream, 1 pint 24 780 16
TOTAL: 344 (25%) 1026 (73%) 28 (2%)

Fructose from the berries represents about a quarter of the carb calories or 7% of total calories.

Dieter’s Dessert: Taro Coconut Cream Soup

Posted by on January 16, 2011 29 comments

Since we’ve started the topic of weight loss, it seems a good time to discuss the sort of dessert one should eat while on a calorie-restricted diet.

Almost any mix of a carbohydrate with a fat can serve as a dessert. Sweeter desserts use more sugar, less starch.

The following principles can guide the design of a Perfect Health Diet weight loss dessert:

  1. Ketogenic fats, such as those in coconut oil, are the best fat source. Ketones can evade certain kinds of metabolic damage, lower blood sugar levels, contribute to metabolic recovery.
  2. Dieters should maintain their regular carbohydrate and protein consumption, since the recommended Perfect Health Diet amounts are calibrated to meet nutritional needs and malnutrition must always be avoided.
  3. Dieters should avoid fructose, a toxin. Carbs are best obtained from starches or from fructose-free sugars like dextrose (the monosaccharide of glucose) or maltose (the disaccharide of glucose).

Here’s one dessert that meets those guidelines. It’s a common Asian-Pacific dessert: Taro Coconut Cream Soup.

First, gather your starches. Here we’re dicing some (already cooked) taro that was leftover from dinner:

Tapioca pearls make another nice addition to the soup. They are white before cooking, but will become transparent when fully cooked:

Put a can of coconut milk in a pot and warm it to the boiling point. You can add up to an equal amount of water if you prefer a less thick soup:

Add tapioca pearls and taro, and simmer for 10-15 minutes until the tapioca pearls are transparent. You may need to stir from time to time to make sure nothing sticks to the bottom:

Once it’s warm and the pearls are cooked, transfer some to a bowl. Here Paul has added a bit of coconut oil for some extra fat, some lemon juice, and cinnamon:

Lemon juice is beneficial to health, for reasons we’ll explain in an upcoming series on enhancing immune function. Lemon juice adds sweetness but has only 7 calories per fluid ounce. Cinnamon increases insulin sensitivity, which is probably desirable for weight loss. Both add to the flavor of the dessert.

There it is – a Perfect Health Diet dessert for those on a diet!

Shou-Ching is not on a diet, and decided to sweeten hers with some clover honey. She also included some leftover sweet potato chunks:

An Aside About Sweet Potatoes

Last week we had a discussion about different kinds of sweet potatoes and yams. So we bought a sampling.  Here, clockwise from upper right, are an American sweet potato (orange), a Korean sweet potato (large and yellow), and a Japanese sweet potato (small and yellow). The last two are botanically yams, not sweet potatoes; they are starchy and not nearly as sweet as the American sweet potato.

The Korean sweet potato is what we eat; it has a pleasant chestnut flavor. I thought the Japanese sweet potato was excellent also. American sweet potatoes are too sweet for my taste.