The Splendid Table on National Public Radio is one of my favorite shows, and it’s based in St. Paul, MN where we once called home. Lynne Rossetto Kasper knows and appreciates her food and the science behind cooking.

A recent post on their website caught my eye: 10 ways to flavor whipped cream. Many of these would not work on the keto diet, and all would need the sugar removed, but it planted a seed of an idea. One day Nora’s lunch had a lot of whipped cream included with berries. Too much whipped cream for her taste (I know, how is that possible?) She also had a little peanut butter with butter mixed in to top a Flacker, so to get the rest of the whipped cream down I mixed the peanut butter in with the whipped cream. Lunch went down just fine.

25 g serving of Peanut Butter Ice Cream with 4 g Green & Blacks 85% Dark Chocolate

This week I decided to try out a batch of dedicated peanut butter whipped cream made in advance and ended up with 2 snacks: Peanut Butter Ice Cream, and Peanut Butter Whipped Cream. Small difference, but here’s why.

First I tried mixing 10 parts cream to 2 parts peanut butter, but it was too heavy for the whipped cream to hold it and remain fluffy. That batch was turned into ice cream, in 25 g servings. Topped with Green & Blacks 85% Dark Chocolate makes a special treat–you can melt it in the microwave in a little silicone pinch bowl, or shave it into chips with a knife. I tried out some myself. I love chocolate and peanut butter, particularly in ice cream form.

The whipped cream recipe that worked was 10 parts cream to 1 part peanut butter. It has a more subtle peanut butter flavor, but holds up well enough to be called whipped cream. Nora is having it with blackberries today, just because she wants to.

1 serving of Peanut Butter Ice Cream, 25 g. Also contains 0.26 g fiber. Analysis by www.caloriecount.com

Peanut Butter Ice Cream
100 g Organic Valley Heavy Whipping Cream
20 g Adams 100% Natural Creamy Peanut Butter
5 g Vanilla Extract

Whip the cream until almost stiff, then add in the peanut butter and vanilla and mix until incorporated. Divide into 5 servings of 25 g each, then freeze.

Remove from freezer 15-20 minutes before serving to let it soften and mix. Top with shaved or melted 85% dark chocolate to reach desired ratio.

Ice cream without chocolate includes 0.26 g of fiber, for 0.64 g net carbs. Ice cream alone is 6.17:1 ratio.

Nutrition Information for one batch of Peanut Butter Whipped Cream. www.caloriecount.com

Peanut Butter Whipped Cream
100 g Organic Valley Heavy Whipping Cream
10 g Adams 100% Natural Creamy Peanut Butter
5 g Vanilla Extract

Food science experts say that the best way to make whipped cream is to keep everything cold. Place your mixing bowl and beaters in the freezer before you start and keep all ingredients cold.

This time I placed all of the ingredients in the mixing bowl together. Whip for about 2 minutes on high until stiff.

Breaking this out per gram, this peanut butter whipped cream contains 0.01 g net carbs, 0.02 g protein and 0.41 g fat for a 11.84:1 ratio. Serve the an amount that makes an appropriate-sized snack with berries or another food to achieve the proper ratio.

Spring! The world is blooming and life gallops on. We have so much going on right now that I have not had much time for blog posts or recipes.

Nora and Luna share a moment a few weeks ago. This is when we realized the chicks should get outside before they started exploring the house.

In addition to the normal spring activities with school, soccer, baseball, piano, friends…we also added four backyard chickens to our brood! They are about 8 weeks old now and looking like little hens. In a few months we will have the freshest of the fresh eggs for keto meals.

In other big busy news–we are moving to a new house! I have been trolling for a house that will give us more space, including a bigger kitchen, and get us on the right side of the busy street we cross daily on our bikes. We also chose a neighborhood with an elementary school that offers full-day kindergarten with a dual-language Spanish immersion program. Nora adores language and will be in heaven there, in addition to the benefits of learning a language when young. We are excited about our move, but it’s adding to an already busy spring.

And in keto-news, Nora’s big news story was intended to get the word out about the keto-diet for other families in the area and it worked! A nearby family contacted us because their little guy was getting progressively worse while on 2 drugs and they had been thinking about diet therapy. After talking with them he really took a turn for the worse and they were able to get in to Doernbecher Pediatric Neurology (the best, where Nora goes) for treatment and started the diet. We feel their suffering while watching their little guy struggle and trying to get the help that they need, and we are thrilled to be able to help them get on the right path. We delivered some keto-treats and shared our support last weekend and he is doing better already. In June we will meet with the keto-team at Doernbecher to official start a support group for families. All good work to keep us busy.

On to Nora’s latest favorite recipe! We’ve had these for months now, and it’s finally time to share. These are also adapted from The Joy of Gluten-free, Sugar-free Baking cookbook, where they are called Chocolate Pecan Cookies. I left some pecans in the recipe, but substituted hazelnuts for most of it because Bob’s Red Mill makes a hazelnut flour but not a pecan flour, and hazelnuts have a little lower carbs per gram. Nora loves them and we hope other keto-kids love them too.

We started out serving them simply with enough cream cut with water to make “keto-milk.” They hold together well enough for dipping.

On the same note, we also served them as chocolate cereal for awhile, crunched up with “keto-milk” of cream and water. Last time I was down the cereal aisle, chocolate cereal in still in fashion, although I won’t buy it for Anders!

Next we started serving them as a large snack of 2 cookies with whipped cream in the middle. It’s either like a big Oreo, or an ice cream sandwich if you prep it then put it in the freezer for awhile. Very satisfying. This would make a great snack to send to school for a special treat when there is a class birthday or some other event.

Then one day Nora needed a smaller snack so I make a little food art with whipped cream and a tower of strawberries. That was a hit! Nora took this to a friend’s birthday party because I didn’t have the time to make cupcakes. The cookies keep in the refrigerator for a week or more, so making a batch will give you the base for several good snacks.

The cookies are also fairly fast and easy. It helps to have some pecans pre-ground, but it’s a small amount to put in the food processor or coffee grinder, which is my preferred way to grind small amounts of nut or seed flour when needed.

Only 0.8 g carb per cookie, and 2.56:1 ratio! Nora gets up to 3.5:1 ratio with 2 cookies, 12 g whipped cream for 178 calorie snack. For the strawberry stack, 1 cookie, 12 g whipped cream and 10 g fresh strawberries for a 114 calorie snack, 3.5:1 ratio.

Nutrition information for 1 Chocolate Hazelnut Cookie. Nutritional analysis by www.caloriecount.com

Chocolate Hazelnut Cookies
(makes 24 cookies at 14 g each)
10 g Bob’s Red Mill Golden Flaxseed Meal
100 g Bob’s Red Mill Hazelnut Meal/Flour
50 g Bob’s Red Mill Almond Meal/Flour
20 g Rapunzel Organic Cocoa Powder
5 g Baking powder
3 g Salt
20 g Pecans, roughly ground
58 g Egg
50 g European-style Butter, melted
11 g Pure vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 350° F (177° C).

Combine flaxmeal, hazelnut meal, almond meal, cocoa powder, baking powder, salt and pecans. Here, I added a packet of Nora’s Cytra-K for sweetness. Add a no-carb dry sweetener of your choice here.

In a large bowl, whisk egg, melted butter, vanilla, and a liquid no-carb sweetener of your choice if desired.

Add the dry mixture to the wet and stir well until a thick, sticky batter forms.

Weigh out 14 grams of dough per cookie. You can roll them in your hands to make a ball then flatten into rounds, as they will not spread when cooking. Place on a prepared silicone baking sheet or parchment paper lined baking sheet.

Bake for a total of 12-15 minutes, rotating halfway through cooking. Transfer to wire rack and cool at least 15 minutes.

Enjoy!

I promised to post a bread recipe long ago. I wanted to try this out a few times before posting it, and it’s finally time to share. Note that a stand mixer is required to make this batter. I don’t want to be responsible for the loss of another hand mixer. (Click on pictures to see larger image).

Having a bread on the keto diet seems to be really important to a lot of kids. I can imagine that it would be critical for older kids who remember “normal” food and see sandwiches around them at school. Nora’s biggest loss when she first started the diet was toast, although we don’t think she really remembers “toast” as the rest of the world knows it.

Nora has especially enjoyed this bread as peanut/almond butter (and butter) and keto-jam sandwiches, but it also holds up well enough to make grilled cheese or toast!

To be clear, it does not have the consistency of wheat-based loaf bread. It is a quick bread and even smells like banana bread to me, even though there is not a hint of banana in it!

This recipe is adapted from the “Toasting Bread” recipe in The Joy of Gluten-free, Sugar-free Baking. There are several similar recipes in that cookbook. The key to this one appears to be the egg whites, which give it a dryer texture after toasting. But after I substituted heavy cream for milk, it’s not exactly a “dry” bread.

I have to address how to use a loaf recipe in the ketogenic diet, because our typical procedure is to pre-weigh the batter and then cook accurate single servings. In this recipe, you will bake the loaf then cut servings of varying weights, and you have to know how to account for that. I’m using these calculations for Nora’s meals because I have verified it myself and we have had no problems. But if your kid is very sensitive or just starting the diet, you probably want to stick to recipes that weigh the batter into servings rather than these batch or loaf recipes that rely on good estimates. I want to be very clear about my procedures here so that you can make the best choices for your kid’s diet. If you are using LGIT or MAD, you are probably just fine with this bread. For the keto diet, you may want to pre-weigh the batter and post-weigh the bread when it is done and do your own calculations. Or weigh it out into smaller loaves so that it is all pre-weighed and adjust the cooking time accordingly. (I also explained this in the Holiday Cookies post, but eventually decided it was much easier to pre-weigh the cookies. Slicing bread to a certain weight is easier than weighing and calculating for each baked cookie.)

The recipe and nutrition information is for one whole loaf, 1169 g of batter. To convert this to nutrition information per gram of baked bread, I weighed the loaf when it came out of the oven and cooled, which was fairly consistant from loaf to loaf: 1057 g. It is lighter than the batter because water cooks out during baking, while the macronutrient breakdown remains the same. Therefore, I take the nutrition information for the full 1169 g of batter and divide it by 1057 to get the per-gram nutrition information (sorry, no fancy nutrition panel for this):

Nutrient             Per gram               40 g serving
Net carbs:         0.033 g                     1.31 g
Protein:              0.117 g                     4.67 g
Fat:                      0.357 g                   14.28 g
Fiber:                  0.075 g                      3.0 g

Ratio:        2.39:1

To calculate it into a meal for Nora, I choose an amount that will fit into her meal, usually 30 to 40 g. Then I cut a piece of bread to that weight. See above for the breakdowns for a 40 g slice (or 2 very thin slices). It packs in a good amount of protein and fiber! A typical meal would be 35-40 g of bread, equal parts natural peanut butter and butter (8 g each, could use almond butter instead), 8 g keto mixed berry jam (could also use crushed raspberries), and 30-40 g of heavy cream steamed with a touch of cocoa for “hot chocolate.” Hits the spot for a kid!

Toasting Bread
(nutrition info for batter, whole loaf)
227 g Bob’s Red Mill Organic Golden Flaxseed Meal
227 g Bob’s Red Mill Hazelnut Meal
32 g sesame seeds
32 g sunflower seeds
20 g baking powder
3 g Bob’s Red Mill xanthan gum
3 g salt
340 g Organic Valley Heavy Whipping Cream
285 g egg whites (about 6 eggs)

Preheat the oven to 375. Line the bottom of a 4.5 x 8 inch loaf pan with parchment paper, then lightly coat with oil.

Weigh the sesame seeds and sunflower seeds, then grind to flour in a clean coffee or spice grinder. You could opt to leave some of each whole if you prefer whole seeds in the bread. Combine with remaining dry ingredients: flaxeed meal, hazelnut meal, baking powder, xanthan gum and salt, and mix well.

In the bowl of your stand mixer, combine the cream and egg whites. You may add a non-carb liquid sweetener here if desired. Blend with paddle attachment thoroughly. Add the dry ingredients, and mix on medium for 2-3 minutes, until you have a thick, sticky, aerated batter.

Pour the mixture into the prepared pan. Bake for 45 minutes, then rotate and bake for another 35 to 45 minutes until golden and springy when pressed in the center.

Transfer to wire rack and cool for at least 5 minutes before turning out of the pan. Loosen around the edges with a thin nice. Cool at least 15 minutes before slicing. Store in the refrigerator.

Because Nora eats so little at a time, I cut the loaf in half to use half and freeze half. She can eat sandwiches for awhile, move on to other foods, and when she asks for bread again I can just get the other half loaf out of the freezer.

When you read the ingredients, you probably thought (as I do), “what about the egg yolks!?!” I’m always trying to use a whole egg. This recipe is the perfect match to keto ice cream on a big cooking weekend! That recipe requires about 6 egg whites. So there you have it. Bread and ice cream. You have everything you need for a very happy keto kid, and no wasted eggs parts.