Keto Cakes Worth Craving

Yesterday we attended our son's first soccer game of the season. It was freezing cold and spitting rain, par for the course this unusually blustery March. After the game the coach passed doughnuts out to the kids. My husband and I have been following the ketogenic diet since September and that made even cold grocery store doughnuts look good! I decided to experiment with some ketogenic mug cake recipes to see if I could re-create the flavor of my favorite Boston Creme doughnut. We rewarded ourselves for sitting in the cold sitting by the fire sampling my test cakes.

To begin, I made filling. This was cream cheese, softened and whipped, then mixed with whipping cream until it had the texture shown in the first photo. Then I whipped it until the texture of the second photo, like a thick whipped cream. I added vanilla monkfruit sweetener to taste. If you don't have vanilla monkfruit, use regular sweetener and vanilla extract instead. The resulting filling tastes like cream cheese frosting rather than Boston Creme. It's good, but next time I think I will use butter in place of the cream cheese to see if the flavor is more what I am after. I'm not great at measuring, I know, but I would say for two cakes, use 4 ounces of cream cheese, about 2 tablespoons of whipping cream, and 8 drops of vanilla monkfruit. My husband likes sweeter desserts than I, and he thought the filling wasn't sweet enough, so if you also have a sweet tooth you will probably always have to adjust my recipes to make them sweeter.

I made the chocolate glaze next. This was wonderful, in my opinion, but it definitely tastes more like dark chocolate than the typical doughnut glaze. For more of a milk chocolate flavor you could add some cream to the recipe. For two cakes, melt 1 ounce unsweetened chocolate with 2 tablespoons unsalted butter and whisk together until smooth. Remove from the heat and stir in 10-20 drops of chocolate monkfruit sweetener. If you are using granular sweetener, add it at the beginning and melt it with the butter to make it smooth.

 The cakes are made with two different mug cake recipes. The cake in the first photo was made as follows:
Grease the mug with butter. Add one egg, 1/4 cup heavy cream, and 1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract and mix well. Add one scoop vanilla protein powder ( I used whey protein), 1/2 teaspoon baking powder, 1 tablespoon coconut flour, 1 tablespoon granulated sweetener ( I used monkfruit). Microwave 60-90 seconds or bake at 350 degrees for 8-10 minutes until the center is just done. Turn on to a plate, slice in half, and fill with the filling. Pour the glaze over the top. 

I didn't love the flavor of this cake because the protein powder I used had an aftertaste I didn't like and was too sweet for me. This cake texture was very dry and sturdy. So if you want a traditional layer cake texture, this recipe will work. I think without the filling and glaze it would have been too dry, but with them it makes a pretty much perfect traditional layer cake. Even with the protein powder not being my favorite, I can see if I wanted a birthday cake type of treat this would have hit the spot!

For the cake in the second photo melt 1.5 tablespoons unsalted butter in your mug and swirl it around to coat the sides and prevent sticking. Add 1 egg, 1.5 tablespoons sour cream, 1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract and mix until smooth. Mix in 3 tablespoons almond flour, 2 tablespoons sweetener (I used granular monkfuit), 1/8 teaspoon salt, and 1/4 teaspoon baking powder. Microwave 90 seconds to 2 minutes or until the center is done and you see no liquid on the sides of the cake. Turn out onto a plate. For a stiffer texture cool, then cut, fill, and glaze. For a gooey texture, immediately cut in half, fill, and glaze. I didn't want to wait so we did the gooey version. As you can see it doesn't hold its shape like a layer cake, It was more like a souffle or cream cake. I preferred this version. It was more like the doughnut I was craving and it didn't have the artificial flavor of the first cake.

I have to say, I really enjoyed spending the afternoon sitting by the fire, eating cake. I'll have to try it more often! This has been a depressing month. We got a continuous monitor for our diabetic son, to alert him if his sugar drops in the night, so he won't fall into a coma. Now it turns out the sensors are five times the cost they originally quoted, and we can't afford them. So he is back to testing with finger sticks to monitor. We looked at other monitors but we can't afford any of them. It makes me feel like a total failure as a parent. Then we took our youngest son to cleft clinic and found out he has hearing loss in one ear. I suspected he couldn't hear and I was correct. He needs a new ear tube, which the ENT wants to install immediately. He is supposed to have a bone graft surgery in the summer and the surgeons want to wait and do the ear tube then. I would certainly prefer to pay for only one surgery rather than two, but I also don't want him to lose his hearing! It's a difficult dilemma to decide these things when the doctors all disagree with one another. Then to top it all off, our new computer, which is only two years old, stopped working. I am typing this on the old computer, which is limping along and takes about 5 times as long to do anything than the new one. I hope the repair bill for the computer isn't too steep! I will go nuts if I have to keep working on this one. Thank goodness I kept it though!

Thankfully, some things are going well. I've finally been added to the Guaranteed Delivery program on eBay. I applied last year! Now eBay will guarantee delivery time for my merchandise, so you can feel confident ordering things for a certain event. My daughter, even though she's only 13, is making origami for me to sell so she can save up for college. I have been turning her miniature water lilies into earrings using 22kt gold-plated fittings, Swarovski crystals, and glass beads. You can custom-order these from my Etsy shop or purchase them ready-made from my Poshmark boutique. You can link to all my stores from the Home page. I hope you will consider purchasing her beautiful work! She's the fastest girl in the 7th grade and competes on the track team and she's so good at math the teacher has her tutoring other kids and grading papers, so it looks like she might be our best hope for a college scholarship. In that case she could use her college savings toward a house or, dare we hope, setting up a medical practice! We could sure use the financial savings!