Replacing sugar, flour in holiday recipes

[icunurse]

With the holidays upon us, I am trying to stick close to a lowish-carb, low-sugar diet. But I still want to make my traditional holiday goodies! What are the latest substitutes for regular flour and white sugar in baking? How do you figure out substitution amounts? Stevia for sugar (I have the Target brand stevia - stevia, erythritol, etc). Flour, I am overwhelmed....seeing coconut and more, not even sure where to find stuff. Any help is appreciated! I live near Costco, Trader Joes, Whole Foods. I will be baking tons of cookies, pies.

[specialp]

My preferences are almond flour and erythritol. However, I don’t have the patience for the trial and error it takes to work on old recipes. Flours especially don’t translate in equal amounts. For coconut flour, you need very little in comparison to regular flour amounts you would use in an old recipe, but need tons more liquid & eggs because it is so high in fiber. For almond flour which is my preference, it is high in density and fat and needs adjustments with the other ingredients such as less fat as well. I think this blog explains http://alldayidreamaboutfood.com/ but I cannot find where at this moment. [ETA: OK, found a little part where she talks about coconut flour in this pancake recipe, which I love BTW. We freeze batches.]

I take the easy way out and find already tried out recipes. Plus, I'm not competing with the way something used to taste. Two that we love are these:Gingerbread bundt cake, but we hate the icing and skip that part. There are lots of great recipes on this blog, but I have also had some misses (almond butter brownies were terrible). Another good recipe for fall is Pumpkin butter cake. All of the recipes I have tried from this blog over the past few years(and I have tried many) have worked well.

[brittone2]

I do erythritol and stevia, because that's what works best for me.

We really like the site linked to by the PP. The woman is a diabetic and an ex pastry chef, and I find many of her recipes very, very reliable. For almond flour, I highly recommend Honeyville Grain's blanched product. It is available from Honeyville or Amazon. It really works much better IME than Bob's, and many other LC people say the same. Coconut flour works well in some applications but the different brands absorb fat and liquids differently, so there is more playing around unless you are sure you are using the same brand as the original recipe developer. I had a tougher time using that initially.

Cheesecake lends itself well to being adapted to LC. The lowcarbfriends' site has a recipe called Beach Girl's cheesecake that is very reliable, with some great adaptations and variations that have been added. I just do the basic one.

The gingerbread bundt cake is one of my DD's favs by far . We also like the gingerbread scones. I double the recipe and add extra ginger, press out into two circles, cut into wedges, then flash freeze the wedges for an hour or so til firm (leaving space between them when flash freezing). Then put into a freezer container. When I am ready to bake, I pull out of the freezer, then bake a few extra mins. You can just bake 1 that way since they were flash frozen, or bake all of the scones. It is like having a stash of LC TJs goodies in the freezer.

I want to try these: http://alldayidreamaboutfood.com/201...uten-free.html and these for the holidays: http://alldayidreamaboutfood.com/201...uten-free.html

These are soooo good if you don't mind slightly more bitter chocolate. I made 2x this recipe, cut into tiny bite sized servings, and flash froze. Then we took them on vacation, and they were gobbled up by LC and non LCers alike The choc portion is slightly bitter, which my DD does not like. My other two kids and DH really enjoy these. What is nice is you can freeze, then just pull out what you want here and there and let thaw maybe 15 mins. Nice to have a little bite once in a while for dessert
http://alldayidreamaboutfood.com/201...uten-free.html

I made this last Christmas and it was excellent: http://alldayidreamaboutfood.com/201...uten-free.html You can bake the cake portion in advance and freeze that until you are ready to finish off the recipe. That's nice for holiday prep. Ditto the following (starts with same or similar cake base): http://alldayidreamaboutfood.com/201...uten-free.html Very yummy, and you can prep the cake portion in advance, then take care of the lemon cream, etc. the day of.

Cookies are harder to get right because erythritol carmelizes differently than sugar and it is just tough to make it work right. The same blog has several biscotti recipes but I haven't tried those yet.

If a recipe calls for stevia, that can vary as some have flow/bulking agents. I tend to stick to the NuNaturals pure stevia products. They revamped their pure stevia powder and it is less concentrated now IMO, but you still use less of that than the stevia varieties with flow agents (maltodextrin usually) added. Truvia has blends with erythritol and stevia added. They also sell some that also contain real sugar, so just pay attention to what you are buying. I usually order erythritol from global sweet, as their varieties are GMO free and birch-derived. My mom and I order a bulk bag and split it. I use Swerve in the PB brownie recipe above as I read some reviews of that recipe that suggested it might work better in there than some other brands of erythritol. I haven't tried it with my regular (global sweet company's) erythritol.