Let's call this one a winner. I brought back with me, from America, many packages of BochaSweet artificial sugar (naturally derived from the Japanese kabocha squash, which Koreans call dan hobak/단호박, or sweet squash) plus one package of BochaSweet brown sugar. I already liked regular granulated BochaSweet (a 1:1 table-sugar replacement), and the granulated faux brown sugar has also turned out to be pretty good. While I was in the States, I ordered a few types of BochaSweet colas as well, but these all proved to be horrible bordering on horrific. Never again. As my buddy Mike noted with astonishment: someone had to sample those sodas and, with a straight face, give the thumbs-up on sending them out into the world. But I also bought and brought back with me some other Bocha Sweet products: a chocolate-chip cookie mix (see here for how that went), a brownie mix (yet to to tried), a pancake/waffle mix, and a keto vanilla cake mix, which I just made today.
The extra ingredients needed to complete the recipe were simple enough: butter or coconut oil (these are substantially different animals*), and four eggs. Separately, there was the frosting package, which required softened butter and a pinch of sea salt. For the cake, you mix the ingredients, then pour them into a standard cake pan (greased and/or parchment-papered) and bake at 350ºF (177ºC) for 30 minutes. Knowing some of my oven's quirks, I set the timer for 35 minutes to give it time to preheat. At the 20-minute mark, I switched on the top burner; five minutes later, I rotated the cake for even browning across the top, and after another five minutes, I judged the cake was ready.
As you might imagine, with the cake's primary flour being almond flour, there wasn't that much of a rise, but I've known since the early 2000s that almond-flour cakes were a thing: there used to be a restaurant in Shirlington, Virginia (northern VA) that served a chocolate almond-flour cake: deflated-looking but delicious. I also failed to follow the frosting-prep instructions correctly: instead of softened butter, I used melted butter. I saw my error upon rereading the instructions, poured the liquidy frosting into a shallow bowl, and set the bowl in the fridge to cool down and solidify. The result wasn't perfect, but I ended up with spreadable, decent-tasting frosting after almost an hour in the fridge. I'm no good at frosting cakes, however, so please forgive the frightening pics you see below.
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| This one's a winner. |
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| the back, with all of the nutrition info |
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| about all the rise you can expect from almond flour and eggs |
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| Seriously: don't look. I'm terrible at applying frosting. My mother used to be great at cakes, among other things. |
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| first look at a slice |
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| the elegantly angled view |
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| a much closer look at the dense crumb, such as it is |
Result? Surprisingly delicious. As you see in the above images, the cake was disappointingly (but not unexpectedly) thin. In terms of texture, this is less like a real cake and more like dense, moist cornbread. I'd made almond-flour cornbread a while back, but today's cake, whatever its connection to cornbread, was definitely better. There was no unpleasant aftertaste or undertone, but after two slices of cake, I did notice the egginess that often accompanies keto breads (well, "breads").
If I were to do this differently next time: (1) I'd follow the frosting instructions better; (2) I'd take the cake instructions' suggestion to use two packages of mix to be able to make a layer cake; (3) I'd whip up some whipped cream and incorporate the frosting into it so as to have more frosting to spread down the sides of my layer cake.
Buying BochaSweet online from Korea is a chore: the company's website has no option for shipping to South Korea. This has always bugged me because the kabocha squash is from Japan and is also found in Korea, so why not set up manufacturing plants here so I can buy BochaSweet as a local product? Yes, I know that that's a selfish, short-sighted, and ignorant thought. I imagine there are plenty of arcane reasons why BochaSweet doesn't ship to East Asia yet. BochaSweet products are, meanwhile, only intermittently available on Amazon and Coupang, and I don't think I've ever seen BochaSweet on iHerb. This is why I'd bought so many bags' worth of the granulated faux sugar. I'm beginning to wish, though, that I had bought more of the faux brown sugar to take back with me.
Next experiment: I want to make my not-quite-keto chocolate-chip cookies (from the ADIDAF recipe—I've blogged these several times), but with BochaSweet brown sugar instead of Truvia (which is 50% real sugar). If the BochaSweet works out, I'll make my cookies with that from now on, thereby knocking the cookies' sugar level down even further. Resorting to keto chocolate chips, though, is a hard sell—a bridge too far in terms of what can be replaced in making a "healthy" cookie. I'll stick with real chocolate chips for now.
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*Butter is an emulsion of fat, milk solids, water, and sometimes salt. Coconut oil is just fat. These things are not the same. I'd be curious to do a side-by-side comparison of today's cake made two different ways—one with butter, the other with coconut oil.
Jesus Christ, man--are you going to pay for the therapy I will no doubt need after looking at those frosting pictures? I have no idea how I am supposed to get through the rest of my day now.
ReplyDeleteSeriously, though, I suck at applying frosting, too. No biggie. But I will say that once you melt butter, there is no going back. Even after it has solidifed again, its composition will have changed, which is why your frosting has that slightly translucent look rather than being opaque and fluffy. (Inicidentally, you might find that the recipe actually makes more if the butter is intact, so you might not need to add whipped cream.)
Finally a baker's note on butter versus oil: In my experience, butter makes for a more flavorful cake, but it also ends up being more dense and a little more on the dry side; oil, on the other hand, makes for a lighter, moister cake. If you are going to use butter, a trick you might want to try is to cream the butter and sweetener together, then add the eggs and whip on high until you get what is essentially a sweet mayonnaise. You can then gently stir in the dry ingredients until they are fully incorporated into the emulsion. This makes a very thick batter that holds a lot more air and thus makes for a lighter cake. You'll have to scoop it into the pan and then smooth it out rather than just pour it in, but any irregularities in the surface should even out as it bakes. This should work with almond flour, too, although I've never tried it.