Dessert Failures: Peanut Butter Cookies and King Cake

Desserts are arguably the most difficult part when cooking low-carb. Baking is all about chemistry, and if you do something wrong, even something small, it can ruin your baked item. Cooking with sugar and flour substitutes takes a lot of time and patience to get right. Two days ago my dad said he wanted peanut butter cookies, so I found a recipe and gave it a go.

They cooked for a long time, and didn't really taste sweet, despite using a lot of stevia. They look odd, and really puffed up, yet they are very filling. They're quite eggy, like most low carb cookies. I have yet to have a low carb cookie come out well. But experimentation is the name of the game.

Secondly, I made king cake on Friday. I noticed that the batter was very thin, even though I followed the recipe (for the cake part) exactly. It called for pecans, but I had none (and don't really like them) so I used 2 chopped up Atkin's bars: peanut butter granola and cranberry yogurt. Bad idea. Weird clash of flavors. Plus they burnt too, as they were sitting on top of the cake while it was cooking. The cake didn't want to come out of the bundt pan, and no amount of banging, tapping, or soaking the pan in ice water would make it come out. I hate that pan. The mixer bowl was in the dishwasher, so I hand mixed the cream cheese icing, so it was lumpy. I tried to color some stevia, but it all just clumped together in a sad, sorry, messy mess. I added some cream and mixed until it mostly dissolved. So after a ton of hard work, all the bowls and spoons in my kitchen dirty, I assembled this cake that had been pried out of its pan and was now in pieces. It was hideous. And then I took a bite. Disgusting. Revolting. Blech. It was essentially a sweet omlette. It even had a cream cheese filling, but that was no where to be found after it was cooked. Subbing the bars for the nuts was a dumb idea, I know, but it would have been terrible anyway if I had wasted expensive pecans on that atrocity of a "cake".

This is why we can't have nice things. This little piece of crap cake. Screw you, cake.

The only good thing about this damn cake was that I took some frozen blackberries and raspberries, added some sugar free simple syrup, and some guar gum. It thickened up to create a pie filling like consistency, and I ate that. I had made it as a topping for the cake, but I ended up eating the berries and chucking the cake.