Simple Delicious Gluten Free Buckwheat Blender Carrot Cake (No Flour)

 This Gluten-Free carrot cake features whole grains of buckwheat milled in the blender! The result is a rich nutty flavor profile and a tender crumb.

Carrot cake is one of my favorite desserts, and I developed this recipe for all my gluten-free friends who are looking for a hearty whole-grain version of the classic. A common misunderstanding when baking gluten-free is that buckwheat contains wheat. Buckwheat is not related to wheat; it is naturally gluten-free and a fantastic choice for those with celiac disease or who are trying to eat gluten-free.

What is the benefit of the whole grain buckwheat?

• Buckwheat is an excellent source of fiber, protein, magnesium, potassium, and antioxidants.
• Buckwheat’s high fiber content and antioxidants can help lower cholesterol levels and reduce the risk of heart disease. 
• Buckwheat is ideal for blood sugar control for people with diabetes. Its low glycemic index means it slowly releases sugar into the bloodstream, which can help regulate blood sugar levels and prevent spikes.

• Buckwheat can improve digestive health when included in the diet. Its high fiber content promotes regular bowel movements and supports a healthy gut microbiome.
• Buckwheat can assist with weight loss. Because it fills and slows digestion, it can help curb hunger and promote weight loss.

• Buckwheat is rich in antioxidants, such as rutin, which may help protect cells from damage and reduce inflammation. 

• Buckwheat may also benefit bone health and immune function and reduce the risk of certain types of cancer.
  

  

Gluten-Free Whole Grain Buckwheat Blender Carrot Cake

2 cups Hulled Organic Buckwheat Groats

5 large eggs

1 1/4 cup vegetable oil

1 tsp. orange zest

1 Tbsp. vanilla

2 cups brown sugar

1 Tbsp. baking powder

1 Tbsp. ground cinnamon

¾ tsp. salt

3 cups finely grated carrots

1 cup coarsely chopped walnuts or pecans

1 cup raisins or dried cranberries

 

Ingredients for Lemon Cream Cheese Frosting

16 ounces of cream cheese, at room temperature

1 cup unsalted butter, at room temperature

2 lbs.. powdered sugar, sifted to remove lumps

1 tsp. lemon zest, micro-grated

2 tsp. vanilla extract

Toasted finely chopped nuts and/or toasted

coconut, for garnish

Directions for Cake:

• Preheat the oven to 350° and prepare 3 8-inch round cake pans. Line with parchment circles and grease the sides with butter and flour.
• In a blender, blend the groats until they are a fine flour.
• Add the eggs and oil and blend until very smooth, about 3 minutes.
• Add the sugar, vanilla, and orange zest and blend for 15 seconds. Pour into a large bowl and add the remaining ingredients.
• Transfer the batter evenly between the 3 pans to the oven.
• Bake for 40-50 minutes. Test the baked cakes with a knife inserted into the centers; it should come out clean. Transfer the pans to cooling racks, cool for 15 minutes, then turn out onto racks to cool to room temperature.

Directions for frosting:

• In a mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, beat the cream cheese and butter until smooth and creamy. Gradually add the sugar and extracts.
• Continue to beat until velvety smooth.
• Frost the cooled cake. Garnish with coconut or toasted nuts.

Always My Very Best,

Your Friend Chef Tess

9 Grain Carrot Cake Pancakes with Butter Toffee Sour Cream Syrup

We love pancakes. What's not to love about fluffy confections that you can drizzle in syrup and eat any time of the day? My youngest son will, at any given time, drop everything and ask for pancakes. No doubt he got that love of pancakes from his adorable daddy.  My husband Ace would eat them every single day. Oh. He does. That is his breakfast almost every day. He's adorable that way. Adorable. Once in a very long while he'll ask for something else, but usually it's pancakes. Whenever I complain about his habit in that regard he'll usually shoot back his heart-melting puppy-dog expression and say, "Steph, when I find something I like, I stick with it." Sigh. Swoon. He loves me forever. Oddly enough, I get a little tired of the same old pancake. I like to switch things up. I also have a mad-sick-evil love for carrot cake. Don't ask me how it started. I don't know all the secrets of the universe that bring together two perfectly paired atoms in the cosmos. Why question fate? Why?  Enters {dramatically with 2001 Space Odyssey music playing boldly in the foreground}...the 9 grain carrot cake pancake of extreme glory drizzled with the ever evil-divine butter toffee sour cream syrup. Sigh. Swoon. I'll love them forever. Something is coming...something wonderful.

Are you ready for the big shocker on this? You can make them sugar free. Yup. This is actually sweetened naturally with a low calorie beauty. How cool am I feeling right now? I can't really tell you with a mouth full of carrot cake. Grin.

9 Grain Carrot Cake Pancakes

with Butter Toffee Sour Cream Syrup

1 c Chef Tess 9 Grain Baking Mix

1/3 cup granulated erythritol  (zero calorie natural sweetener)

1/2 tsp Chef Tess Wise Woman of the East Spice Blend

1 tsp vanilla

1/2 cup fine shredded carrot

2/3 cup water

Combine all ingredients and cook on a medium hot griddle as you would regular pancakes.

Now we need syrup right?

The first time I ever shared this Butter Toffee Sour Cream Syrup was when I posted the recipe for the Gluten Free Butterscotch Pecan Buckwheat Pancakes. Those are amazing drizzled with this syrup. I'm not going to lie. This syrup over the carrot cake pancakes nearly made me pass out. It is just a deliriously-divine combination.Yup. Incandescently happy. The being kissed by Mr. Darcy kind-of-happy. {Pride and Prejudice aside my darlings, I think he's adorable.}
That being said, here's the recipe for the butter toffee sour cream syrup.

Chef Tess' Butter Toffee Sour Cream Syrup

1/2 cup fat free sour cream
2T butter
1 cup sugar or  granulated erythritol  (zero calorie natural sweetener) 
1 tsp ultra gel
1/2 tsp English Toffee flavor oil
2T hot water
Directions: Combine all the ingredients in a sauce pan. Bring to a boil and boil 2 minutes until sugar is dissolved. Stir well. Serve warm over hot pancakes. Store any un-used portion in the fridge. Yields 1 1/2 cups.
Butter Toffee Sour Cream Syrup Mix

1/2 powdered sour cream

2T  powdered butter

1 cup sugar or granulated erythritol  (zero calorie natural sweetener)

1 teaspoon cornstarch or ultra gel

1/2 tsp English Toffee flavor oil

1/2 cup hot water

To make the syrup, combine the dry ingredients and the flavored oil. Stir well. Add the hot water and bring to a simmer over low heat in a medium size heavy bottom sauce pan. Cook 2-3 minutes until sugar is dissolved. Do not over-cook or the syrup will get very thick. Serve over the pancakes. Store unused portion in the fridge after use. I doubt there'll be much left over. 

There you go. Make some carrot cake pancakes. Sigh. Swoon. You'll love them forever.

Always My Very Best,
Your Friend Chef Tess

Righteous Morning Muffins...9 Grain Carrot Cake

All right. I admit it. I have a viscous weakness for carrot cake. Evil little confection. How can something so chuck full of vegetables be so danggum evil? What is it about that fluffy spiced carrot and nut confection that makes me go weak in the knees? Sigh... Cuss. Cuss.  It's a tedious balance between love and hate that I have for carrot cake.   If I believed in reincarnation, I'd think I was a rabbit who lived at the nut house in a former life. Seriously. I bet I'd have been cute. Ya know...with a button nose and some floppy ears and all the carrots and nuts I could eat. Do rabbits eat nuts? You thought I was talking about the loony-bin huh?  Well. There's a special place reserved for me there too...with nice rubber wallpaper. {black and white polka-dots on it}...
Here's the deal-i-ohhhh. I love carrot cake, enough that I thought I needed to make it for breakfast. Not that there's anything wrong with carrot cake for breakfast right? In Chef-Tess land, all things are possible. Sniff the air in Chef Tess Land. It sells like carrots and spice...and a little bit of crazy. 

I went back in the blog and realized...yup. I'm carrot cake girl. Look at them:
Carrot Cake Breakfast pudding,
 Low Fat Carrot Cake Cookies,
 Cranberry Carrot Cake With Lemon Cream Sauce
Sourdough Carrot Cake with Warm Cream Cheese Lemon Sauce
Snackin' Dino Carrot Cake
Caramel Filled Carrot Cupcakes with Toffee and Candied Pecans
I need more for breakfast right? (This is where you nod your head and just agree. It's safer that way.) I need less fattening good-for-me carrot cake. I need carrot cake that won't make my "bum" look big. Seriously. Is it so much to ask for? In working with my 9 Grain Baking Mix I realized I had created my own solution. This is a low fat, whole grain muffin with added corn bran, flax seed and chia seed so I get my fiber and my omega-oils. They are sweetened naturally with a zero carb natural sweetener. They are a moist delicious solution to my carrot cake obsession. See. I knew it could be done. 

Chef Tess' Righteous Morning Carrot Cake Muffins

2 cups 9 Grain Baking Mix 

1 cup granular erythritol (sugar free natural sweetener)

1/3 cup corn bran

2T Flax Seed

2T white Chia Seed

2 tsp Wise Woman of the East Spice Blend

2tsp vanilla

1 1/2 cup water

2 cups fine shredded carrot (about 2 large carrots)

Directions:  Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In a large half gallon size bowl, combine the baking mix, erythritol (sugar will work in it's place), corn bran,seeds and spice blend. Add the vanilla and water. Stir until just combined. Fold in the shredded carrots.  Fill 12 muffin cups 3/4 of the way full. Bake in 350 degree oven 20-22 minutes until muffins are golden brown and spring back when you touch them lightly (don't burn yourself.). 

Serve warm or wrap when they cool and store them in an airtight container. Yield 1 dozen muffins. (see nutritional info below)

There you go. Make righteous morning muffins carrot cake muffins for breakfast. You know I love you right? See...I really do. I shared my carrot cake. That's an act of supreme love right there.  Now I need to go pick out some nice rubber wall-paper.  Get your printable recipe kitchen wall paper here.

Nutritional information for 1 muffin.

Calories: 104

Total fat: 2.2 g

Cholesterol: 15 mg

Sodium: 20 mg

Potassium: 192 mg

Total carbohydrate: 18.7g

Dietary Fiber:   5 g

sugars: o.0 g

Protein: 4.5 g

Always My Very Best,

Your Friend Chef Tess

6 Grain Carrot Cake Breakfast Pudding ( In a Jar...52 Method Continues))

I sat down at my grandmother's kitchen table and shredded carrots, peeled apples, crumbled homemade bread and waited as impatiently as a little seven year old girl could wait to finally see steamed spiced carrot-pudding emerge from grandma's oven. It was full of fruit, heavy with spice and fudge-like in texture. It was pure heaven.  This breakfast cereal tastes like a cross between her pudding...and a rich carrot cake. It's not as sweet as carrot cake or as dense as grandma's pudding  so add more sweetener if you prefer. I tend to under-sweeten and let people adjust to their tastes. Grandma used to drizzle her pudding with a warm tart lemon sauce. I just drizzled this with some coconut milk and topped it with toasted nuts. However you do it...this is going to be a family favorite. I know it will be.

In the grand and beautiful world of cooking with whole grain, it's sometimes a blessing and a curse to love food as much as I do. I mean, in all honesty, I can't imagine doing anything else for a living. I dance gleefully in my kitchen daily. Daily. Who can really say that about their job? I giggle. I get giddy-happy when a plan comes together or a recipe turns out exactly as my chef-mind imagined it would and could. This is one of those dishes. It's a "dancing-happy-people-holding-hands" kind of taste. (You'll have that song in your head all day now huh?)  Making it healthy and also good to keep in the food storage is also a big deal to me. So, the 52 Method Meals in a Jar  that I announced a while ago and that has since gone completely crazy (in a good way) continues today. It's a basic menu planning method for food storage based on meals that your family will eat, having all the ingredients in one-quart size jar. ONE jar...easy to find. Easy to plan.

Special thanks to my Chef Tess Thrive Life Foods for the products we're using in today's post.  I've had a lot of folks now asking what we have on the menu for the breakfast/brunch meal. I plan two meals a day for emergency situations and long-term issues. So. This is the first breakfast recipe I'm sharing. It's shelf stable 8-10 years and makes a breakfast cereal that's a cross between a carrot cake and a rich pudding. It's a sin...yet it's healthy!

It's hard to imagine it looks like this in a jar right?

Chef Tess' 6 Grain Carrot Cake Breakfast Pudding (in a jar)
1/2 cup Freeze Dried Pineapple or Freeze Dried Apples
1 cup Dehydrated Carrot
1/2 cup instant non-fat dry milk
1/4 cup Powdered Butter
1/2 cup dehydrated honey or sugar
2T Instant Vanilla Pudding Mix
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp  Chef Tess Wise Woman of the East Spice Blend
2 cups 6 Grain Rolled Cereal

Place pineapple and carrots in a quart jar. Top with powdered milk, butter, honey, flavorings, pudding mix, salt and spice blend. Shake the dry ingredients down into the carrots and pineapple. Top with the 2 cups of 6-grain cereal. The jar will be full. Top with an oxygen absorber.

To Prepare:
Bring 5 cups water to a rolling boil. Add contents of the jar to the water and stir. Lower heat to a simmer and cook 10-12 minutes. Turn off heat. Cover and sit 5 minutes (to be sure pineapple is hydrated).  Serve warm. Drizzle with milk, honey or syrup if desired. Top with chopped pecans or any nuts as desired as well. Note: high-fat nuts are not included in the meal in a jar. This will give you an extended shelf life of 8-10 years. 



There you go! 
Always My Very Best,
Your Friend Chef Tess