4th Of July Sugar-Free Flag Cake!

30 Jun 4th Of July Sugar-Free Flag Cake!

There is definitely something about the 4th of July and dessert for me! Apparently I can’t have one without the other.

This year has proven to be a little bit trickier for me since I have two corporate companies still going through a Sugar Elimination Challenge (SEC)…. which means, no sweeteners of ANY KIND and very limited fruit. So even though my watermelon cake – which I posted two years ago and is always a HUGE showstopper for ANY party – is technically sugar-free (if you omit the maple syrup in the coconut cream), I don’t allow watermelon on the SEC program so that meant I couldn’t do it this year.

Thank goodness for berries and unripe bananas though! I do allow up to 1 cup a day of strawberries, blueberries, blackberries and raspberries as well as one unripe banana – so between those fabulous fruits, you actually have a bit of flexibility when it comes to making a truly sugar-free dessert.

Incidentally, I always surprise a lot of people with the fact that I allow bananas on my challenge and then the question almost always come up as to why they have to be unripe. Here’s the short answer….

Banana’s contain a type of starch called “resistant starch” (RS). This starch cannot be digested in the stomach or small intestine so it reaches the colon intact.  Thus, why it’s called resistant starch because it “resists” digestion.  This also explains why we don’t see spikes in either blood glucose or insulin levels after eating RS, and why we do not obtain significant calories from RS.

According to Dr. Amy Nett, MD, the normal human gut has hundreds of bacterial species, some are good and some not so good.  The overall number and relative quantity of each type has a profound effect on our health and well being.  Resistant starch selectively stimulates the good bacteria in our intestines, helping to maintain a healthy balance of bacteria overall.

Alright, so back to the recipe.

I’ve always wanted to do a flag cake for the 4th of July, I remember my mom doing these when we were kids, and with the ability to use berries as well as my favorite sugar-free coconut whipped cream, all I really had to figure out was a good pie crust – and after a little bit of trial and error, we found success!

Ingredients:

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Place the pecans in a food processor and process until you have a coarse flour. Add the almond flour, salt, baking soda, cinnamon, butter/coconut oil, egg, and vanilla and pulse until a ball of dough forms. In the pictures above I used an immersion blender because I actually forgot to grind the pecans first and it still turned out!