Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease cookie sheets with coconut oil.
Mix together flour, baking powder and salt and set aside.
Cream together butter, coconut oil and sugar. Add eggs one at a time, add vanilla. Add almonds followed by flour mixture, 1/2 cup at a time.
Roll dough out between 2 sheets of wax or parchment paper and cut into circles. Cut a smaller circle in half of the cookies.
Transfer to prepared cookie sheets and bake for 12 minutes, or until lightly browned. Move to wire racks to cool.
When completely cool, assemble. Place a small dollop of fruit spread on the cookie without the hole and cover with a cookie with the hole. Dust powder sugar over the top (optional).
Preheat oven at 350. Grease a 10x15x1 inch jelly roll pan generously with coconut oil.
Cream butter and cream cheese together; add sugar. Beat in eggs one at a time. Blend in flours and salt. Spread in prepared pan.
Bake cake for 20 minutes. Immediately after removing from oven spoon the peanut butter/coconut peanut butter over the top. Let sit a few minutes until melted and spread evenly (if using crunchy peanut butter put back in the oven for 4 minutes till it melts enough to spread). Let set or store in the refrigerator until peanut butter/coconut peanut butter hardens.
Melt chocolate chips and spread over the peanut layer. Let sit until firm or store in the refrigerator.
Place pumpkin and spices into a small saucepan and heat gently over medium low heat, stirring constantly. Heat just until slightly warmed through.
Place the eggs and sweetened condensed milk into a bowl and add pumpkin. Whisk to combine and pour into prepared crust.
Bake for 13 minutes. Reduce temperature to 350 and bake for another 35 – 40 minutes or until knife inserted 1 inch from crust comes out clean. Cool completely and store in the refrigerator.
In a medium sized bowl cut the butter and coconut oil into the coconut flour until mixture resembles irregular pea sized clumps. Add remaining ingredients except egg white. Mix together with your hands until a soft dough has formed. Pat dough into a 9 inch pie pan. When you are done forming the crust, take the egg white and beat it with a fork until frothy. With a pastry brush, brush the crust with the egg white just before filling.
* You can make your own sweetened condensed milk
with our recipe here.
Life without gluten can be full of obstacles and variations, but that shouldn’t mean you have to settle for something less.
Take cake for an example. Gluten-free cakes will never be as good as the wheat ones, right? WRONG! I myself am not gluten intolerant, but I do know what it’s like to have to give something up because it’s not healthy and try to find an alternative. I don’t like to settle for something less; for me taste is a very close second to healthy.
My biggest goal in producing gluten-free recipes is “foolproof-ness.” Cake was a big one, and I was eager to try it. This was right about the time that I was really getting into my little coconut flour frenzy and trying to come up with as many recipes as possible for the product. Cake was something I hadn’t tried yet, but I was ready to start experimenting.
The first thing was ideas. I wanted to do a yellow and chocolate cake, but decided on the chocolate first. I found a chocolate cake recipe I liked, and began the long process of taking it apart, adding, taking away, testing, testing, testing. By the time I was done it was a totally different recipe. It was by far the longest time I ever spent developing a recipe; even longer then my Coconut Flour Brownies. I tried, and tried again. Each time there always seemed to be something wrong with it. The biggest issue was the dryness. It always seemed too dry. The more I experimented, the more the amount of eggs grew. Soon they had reached a rather alarming amount, but by that time I finally had the perfect gluten free chocolate cake.
It was moist, fluffy, chocolaty, and perfectly foolproof. Many times I’ve made them for company dessert (many with little kids by the way) and unless I told them they were gluten free they would’ve never known or suspected and would’ve just kept on happily wolfing it down.
No, no, seriously. It’s really that good. If you make it, follow the recipe exactly and please don’t change a thing and then tell me it doesn’t work. It really does work. The eggs are the most important part, and they definitely cannot be changed.
While you’re mixing the eggs and butter together, don’t panic if the butter separates into little sesame seed shapes. That’s normal, and doesn’t bother anything at all. I also recommend having the butter still just a tad bit cold, not near melting point.
This recipe can be made as a 2, 8 inch layer cake, a 9 inch layer cake, or cupcakes. I like to use a buttercream frosting for this cake but pretty much anything that goes with chocolate will be good on this.
If any of you try the recipe, please feel free to let me know how you liked it. 🙂
Gluten Free Coconut Flour Chocolate Cake
Prepared by Sarah Shilhavy, Photo by Jeremiah Shilhavy
Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees. Grease two 9 inch or 8 inch layer pans with coconut oil and dust with cocoa powder.
In an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, combine butter and sugar, and beat together for about 2 minutes. Add eggs in one at a time and beat high speed for about 3 minutes. Add in the vanilla while beating the eggs and butter mixture. In a separate bowl, combine the dry ingredients together and add alternately with the milk to the butter mixture. Beat batter for about five minutes on high speed. Spoon batter into the two prepared cake pans and smoothen out tops.
Bake in preheated oven for 30-35 minutes, or until toothpick inserted into the center of cake comes out clean. Place pans on wire rack and cool for 10 minutes before removing from pans. Cool cakes completely before frosting. Use your favorite frosting to frost the cake.
Peppermint Chocolate cake variation: add 1 teaspoon peppermint extract to batter before pouring into pans and mix well. Frost cake with peppermint frosting or frosting of your choice.
Cupcakes: Make recipe as directed but spoon batter into muffin cups and bake for about 26-30 minutes. Frost after cupcakes have cooled completely. Makes about 24 cupcakes.
Once again I found myself with overripe bananas just begging to be used. No matter how long I tried to hide them in the refrigerator they just wouldn’t go away or stop yelling at me every time I opened the door.
Today however, I was finally able to silence them. I dug up an older coconut flour recipe that I had been meaning to improve for a while now. The results from the recipe were satisfactory and tasty, but it definitely could be made even better. For me, it has to be perfect. Well, pretty near that anyway. As I wrote earlier in my post about the Coconut Flour Cocoa Banana Muffins, coconut flour baked goods don’t have to be dense and heavy. With just a little of your time, the know-how, and a good recipe, you can make an excellent coconut flour pastry.
But what if you don’t have a good recipe? How do you improve it? Well first off, know what you don’t like about it, then break the recipe down. Take a good look at it. Here I’ll show you by letting you take a look at the original recipe ingredient list and then showing you my improvised version. Why only the ingredients? Because that’s where the problem is. Also, I only use Tropical Traditions’ coconut flour, and can’t guarantee that the recipes developed using our coconut flour would work with a different coconut flour, because they can vary in protein and fiber content. If the problem was in how the recipe was put together it’d be a different thing. So here it is:
So, we’re looking at a whole cup of coconut flour (which is a very thirsty flour by the way) and only 2 tablespoons of milk as the “thinning” liquid. The fat (butter and coconut oil in this case) are liquids here, but they act differently then water based liquids and don’t help out too much in saturating the flour. The first conclusion is that there isn’t enough liquid. That means the batter is too heavy to rise and “mushroom” over properly, and will therefore be very dense and heavy. It will be moist and pretty tasty though, since the fat amount is perfect.
Another red flag is the sweetener amount. Only 3 tablespoons for 12 muffins isn’t very much. While you don’t want a sickeningly sweet muffin you do want just enough sweetness to bring all the flavors together, instead of leaving it bland. Since we will be increasing the thinning liquid amount, the sweetener will grow blander and will therefore need to be increased as well.
I like my muffins to rise really well (since that is the main downfall of most coconut flour recipes), so I’ll add a bit of baking soda. The coconut flour is a heavy flour, so it usually needs more baking soda/powder to get it to rise. Baking powder has a more neutral taste then baking soda, which needs to be countered by the acidity of another ingredient (here it will be the honey). However, I’ve found that baking powder isn’t as potent as baking soda, so you usually have to use more of it, or add a bit of baking soda to help it out.
So that’s that. The eggs are fine. Leave them be please; every single one of them is needed to make up for the gluten – don’t find out the hard way! Everything else is fine also.
In the end, we get this:
Gluten Free Coconut Flour Banana Muffins
Prepared by Sarah Shilhavy, Photo by Jeremiah Shilhavy
True, they aren’t the prettiest muffins you’ve ever seen, but looks aren’t as important as taste and texture. The tops are a bit irregular, but the muffins rose well and are light and fluffy on the inside, not to mention delicious!
Now take a minute to compare the before and after recipes, and then head off to the kitchen to whip up a batch for yourself. Talk about yum…
I give you a method for melting the coconut oil while greasing the pan, saving you a dish. You can certainly melt the coconut oil in one pan and grease the pan separately. Also, I add the coconut oil last just in case it is still pretty warm. The eggs already mixed with the other ingredients provides a bit of a buffer in case the oil is still too warm. Scrambled egg cake is not what we’re after here.
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Measure out coconut oil and place in an 8″x8″ pan. Place the pan in the oven to melt the coconut oil.
While the coconut oil is melting, whisk the eggs, coconut milk, honey, vanilla and orange zest together.
Once the coconut oil is melted (probably around five minutes or less), remove the pan from the oven and let it cool while you mix in the rest of your ingredients. Combine coconut flour, baking powder and salt. Stir the dry ingredients into the wet.
Once your pan is cooled enough to handle, carefully swirl your coconut oil around your pan in order to grease all sides. Then pour the coconut oil into the batter and mix until all lumps are gone.
Pour the batter into your greased pan and place on the middle rack of the oven. Bake for 35-40 minutes, until browned on top and a toothpick comes out clean. Place the cake on a cooling rack.
After the cake has cooled a bit, but is still warm, poke holes all over the top with a fork. Juice the orange half right over the whole cake, making sure to evenly distribute the juice.
Orange Coconut Oil Frosting
Be sure to melt your coconut oil in a glass bowl. I do this by putting the bowl over a small pan of simmering water.
Mix all ingredients into warm coconut oil. You are now going to place the bowl into the freezer in order to cool it down. It is very important to check on it every couple of minutes to catch it before it gets too cold. You want to take it out of the freezer right when it starts to get cloudy.
At this point the cold bowl (and your cool kitchen) will continue to turn the liquid oil into a solid. Continue to whisk the frosting as it gets cloudier and cloudier and eventually turns into a whipped butter consistency. The idea is to get a bit of air into it.
Once it is to a whipped (very soft) butter consistency plop it onto your cooled cake. Frost it very quickly before the coconut oil hardens. It will seem like a pretty thin frosting, but it is just enough.
Prepared by Sarah Shilhavy, Photo by Jeremiah Shilhavy
I recently made these Chocolate Coconut Protein Bars, and they were pretty good! The triple amount of coconut provides the energy element, and the protein powder gives you the protein. It’s the best of both worlds; energy and protein rolled into one bar. Why make both a protein and energy bar when you can have them both in one?
The bars were pretty delicate. If you want them moister you could add another egg or more oil if you wanted a higher oil serving. Either way, this recipe is pretty forgiving so feel free to play around with it a bit until you get the desired texture and results. I made a half batch and pressed it into a greased square glass pan and then cut it into bars. That way it comes out looking more like a bar instead of a cookie or something.
The bars are very filling; you can only eat so much. The chia seeds expand in your stomach and give you that “full” feeling pretty quickly, which is a good thing.
Be sure to check the recipe out, and comment if you have any questions or comments of your own.
Preheat oven to 375. Grease cookie sheet(s) with extra coconut oil.
Melt oil if needed and in a large bowl stir in remaining ingredients with the oil until well blended. Place spoon sized mounds unto prepared cookie sheets and pat down slightly into bars.
Bake in preheated oven for 14-15 minutes. Don’t overcook.
