Any chocolate cake recipe, including one made without gluten like the recipe here, can be modified to use stevia in place of other sweeteners. If you want to avoid refined sugars as well as gluten, rest assured that you can still have your cake and eat it too!
Gluten-Free, Refined Sugar-Free Chocolate Cake Recipe
This rich, moist chocolate cake uses a mixture of coconut flour and almond meal as its base. It's sweetened with a combination of liquid and powdered stevia, and it has a decadent chocolate flavor.
Ingredients
- 6 eggs
- 2/3 teaspoon vanilla liquid stevia extract
- 1/4 teaspoon pure powdered stevia extract
- 1 cup vanilla unsweetened almond milk
- 1/2 cup coconut oil, melted
- 1/2 cup coconut flour
- 1/4 cup almond meal
- 1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 3/4 teaspoon baking soda
- 2 tablespoons strong coffee
Instructions
- Beat the eggs with the stevia and almond milk until light in color.
- Beat in the coconut oil and coffee.
- In a separate bowl, combine the coconut flour, almond meal, cocoa powder, salt and baking soda.
- Slowly incorporate the wet ingredients into the dry, mixing well.
- Pour the mixture into a 9-inch baking pan lined with parchment paper, and bake at 350 degrees for 15 to 20 minutes, or until set in the middle.
Frosting Ingredients
- 1/3 cup cocoa
- 2 teaspoons stevia powder
- 1/4 cup coconut oil, melted
- 1/2 cup coconut cream, chilled until firm
- 1/2 teaspoon vanilla
Frosting Instructions
- Combine the ingredients in a medium-sized bowl.
- Beat until fluffy.
- Spread on the cooled cake.
Baking with Stevia
Since the taste of stevia is up to 300 times sweeter than that of cane sugar, it's best to start out on the conservative side as you experiment with using it in your recipes. When substituting stevia for cane sugar, Stevia Info.com recommends:
- Substitute 1/2 teaspoon powdered stevia for 1 cup of sugar.
- Substitute 1 teaspoon of liquid stevia
Avoiding the Aftertaste
Stevia has a very slight, bitter aftertaste, particularly if you use too much. It combines well with coconut flour, almond meal, and white/sweet rice flour, but garbanzo bean flour, brown rice flour, and soy flour tend to increase the bitterness and should be avoided.
Sweeten Naturally
Learning to work with stevia can take some time, particularly as you work it into various gluten-free flours. Try this rich, chocolate recipe as your starting point, though, to savor how good gluten-free and sugar-free living can be.
