Low Carb / Keto Brownies – DietNet Recipes

A few months ago, I was trying out a recipe for Keto Flourless Chewy Double Chocolate Chip Cookies which sounded divine. Unfortunately, at the point where I should have had a dough, I didn’t – I had a cake mix. So I lined a swiss roll tin with some baking paper, slopped it on, and threw it in the oven. When it came out, it was like a flat brownie. So I just abandoned the idea of cookies…

Maybe the reason it came out a bit different was that I changed a few ingredients.

I used a different sugar free sweetener and cut it back drastically, since we’re not used to very sweet baking any more. The recipe calls for confectioners erythritol, which I didn’t have, but I did have an erythritol / monkfruit blend called Lakanto. I cut it back from 2/3 cup to 3 tablespoons. Some people will need a bit more than that.

I didn’t have peanut butter powder, so put in some Great Lakes collagen hydrolysate.

I’ve made it a few more times since, and now make a 1.5 times mix, and bake a fatter version.

Ingredients

3 eggs
3 Tablespoons water
1 x 300gm jar nut butter (note 1)
15gm raw cacao or cocoa powder, sifted
25gm / just over 3 Tbs Great Lakes collagen hydrolysate (note 2)
3 Tablespoons (or up to 2/3 cup) Lakanto (note 3)
1 teaspoon vanilla powder (or use extract)
1 1/3 teaspoons baking soda, sifted
50gms sugar free dark chocolate baking bits

Note 1 – I use an almond, brazil and cashew blend, but the original was almond

Note 2 – Or use peanut butter powder as in the original recipe, or protein powder of your choice. If you don’t need this to be keto, you could also use any flour of your choice.

Note 3 – If keto, use whichever erythritol based sweetener you like best. If not keto, experiment with your choice of sweetener. For GAPS, you could use honey, but ground up dried dates might work better.

The Process

First beat together the eggs and water till frothy. If you’re using a liquid vanilla, add that here too.

Scrape the nut butter into the bowl and mix some more, till it’s completely smooth.

Mix the rest of the ingredients together in a smaller bowl.

Mix them into the wet ingredients. (See, that’s cake mix, not dough, right?)

Line your cake tin with baking paper. I use a 20cm x 15cm glass rectangle. Spoon in the mix and bake at 175C for about 30 mins, testing with a skewer to see when it’s done.

You can see I’ve left it quite plain this time.

But you could jazz it up with chocolate icing (frosting) or just more melted chocolate. Or it might be nice cut through the middle and filled with whipped cream.

One way to make it look Xmassy is to garnish with strawberries, and in this case, I nipped a bit off an angelica plant in our back yard.

Christmas variation

For Christmas Day, I used star shaped silicon molds to make individual mini muffins.

I filled up 12 star shaped silicon muffin cups with about half of the mix, and put the rest in a smaller glass tray than usual. Instead of stirring the choc bits into the batter, I used bigger ones and poked one into the middle of each muffin, and stirred a few into the remaining mix. Cooking time was 15 mins.

Note on the silicon baking trays

I love these things, so much easier to get things out of them. BUT… keto baking is very soft, and I’m finding the easiest way to get them out is to wait till they’ve cooled, freeze them still in the cups, then peel the cups off. For the Xmas batch, since I made them three days before they were needed, I took them out of the pans, and straight into a plastic ziplock bag and back in the freezer. I then took them out Xmas morning and they were nice and fresh.