Due to my health condition and food allergies, I must eat grain-free and dairy-free and am thus limited to nut flours and coconut flour. While others love almond flour, I only like it somewhat, and it is very expensive. So, I was very interested in starting to cook with coconut flour. From what I have read, coconut flour is quite healthy. It has a high fiber content and decent protein content. It is also less expensive than almond flour. Finally, coconut flour seems healthier to me than the (high-glycemic index) rice-flour, potato starch, gum combinations that so many gluten-free individuals can turn to. My digestive system cannot function with the typical gluten-free rice flour mixes anyway.
I wondered how the coconut flour would taste. I think that its flavor is very subtle and not like that of coconut, but rather it has a very caramel(ized) flavor, which is delicious. The `cupcakes' (I prefer the word muffin...since I don't frost them) are extremely moist. Yes, they are slightly denser that what you might have been used to with wheat-flour muffins/cupcakes. But they are also moister. A definite plus, in my opinion. As I read in another cookbook, one has to stop expecting non-wheat products to taste like wheat-products. Wheat has a taste that we are used to and other flours will not have that taste.
So far, I have made the following recipes from the book (I am an experienced baker):
-Lime cupcakes (but I substituted lemon zest for the lime zest and added poppy seeds). The recipe was a ˝ almond flour, ˝ coconut flour recipe. Very good. One of my favorites.
-Chocolate banana cupcakes. A coconut flour only recipe. Very moist and good. I am not sure that I love this flavor combination, though. Next time, I will just use Elana's banana muffin recipe.
-Basic Vanilla cupcakes. A coconut flour only recipe. Moist and delicious. As I said, there is almost a caramel flavor to them that seems to come from the coconut flour (or from the agave too?). I tried to do a calorie count for one muffin and came up with: 192 calories for one muffin. Another favorite.
-Apple Spice cupcakes. A coconut flour and arrowroot starch recipe. Good. Elana's recipe called for 1T of cinnamon, which seemed like a lot to me. I reduced it to 2t and it was still powerful. These cupcakes taste less sweet than the others I've made despite having the same amount of agave. Not as moist as the other recipes....could it be due to the arrowroot? Next time, I am going to leave out the arrowroot and see what happens. Also instead of chopping the apples, I think I will shred them on food processor disk.
-Strawberry cupcakes. My least favorite of the cupcakes. I just didn't like the texture of the fresh strawberries once cooked (to me, they are mushy and stringy...the flavor changes too). I might try strawberries again...but I would perhaps cook them to reduce them down and bit before adding. And I would use the coconut cupcake recipe base.....again, this strawberry cupcake recipe had arrowroot starch and I find that the recipes with arrowroot are less moist. Also, this recipe had no oil in it. Surely another reason that I didn't like them. I ended up throwing this batch out.
-Lemon-blueberry muffins. Very moist, very lemony, and bursting with blueberries. The second time I made these, I reduced the blueberries from 1 cup to ľ cup and I eliminated the lemon zest, since I wanted more of a pure blueberry taste w/out the pronounced lemon flavor. I loved the result w/ my changes.
-Coconut Cupcakes. A coconut flour and coconut oil recipe. I replaced the agave with coconut sugar syrup (boil 1 ˝ cups coconut sugar with ˝ cup water...and then measure. I got this idea from a comment on one of the reviews here..thank you!). I wanted an all coconut muffin (coconut flour, coconut sugar, coconut oil) WITHOUT a pronounced coconut flavor, so I left out the shredded coconut in the recipe. Result: extremely moist, caramel flavor. A rich, buttery taste on the palate and not too dense. They are great with jam. Also, it would be delicious with the shredded coconut as called for in the recipe...I like coconut but don't always want it. It would be easy to add some zest, chocolate shavings or something to jazz it up. This will be my go-to recipe, but I will add mix-ins to vary them. I tried to calculate nutritional info for my version using the info on the packaging of ingredients and doing the math. I came up with this info per muffin: 211 calories, 3.8g protein, 15g (healthy) fat, 13g sugar, 2.5g fiber. Just right for me as a snack/dessert/treat.
-Vegan Buttercream: For me, the result was inedible and it went into the trash. I followed the recipe exactly, with the brands Elana recommended. I should have known that I would hate the final product since I didn't like the taste of the Earth Balance Natural Buttery Spread (soy free). This product is very salty. So, for me, the "buttercream" was way too salty and just had a bad taste (the taste of the Earth Balance product). I tried to save it by adding homemade vegan caramel that I had on-hand and then melted dark chocolate. Nothing helped cover the taste of the Earth Balance spread (salt!). Next time, I will try her Vegan Chocolate Frosting recipe, which does not contain the Earth Balance spread.
It is very easy to make substitutions for those who don't want to follow the recipes to the letter. In the recipes, I used virgin coconut oil. Coconut oil does not make the muffins/cupcakes taste distinctly like coconut. If there are any flavorings (zest, cinnamon, fruit), the coconut taste disappears. Some disagree, but I think that coconut oil is healthy. As for agave, I do use it sometimes (and find it delicious). But I have also used honey in its place. I would use maple syrup, but it is very expensive. I am planning on mostly using coconut sugar syrup (1 ˝ cups blonde organic coconut sugar with ˝ cup water boiled, which makes 1 cup of coconut sugar syrup. Then measure it like you would agave.). The coconut sugar syrup costs me about 15% of what agave or maple syrup costs me, is organic and seems like a good choice.
Elana says in the introduction that she doesn't recommend freezing the cupcakes once they are made. I must freeze them, because I try to not eat more than one a day and absolutely no more than two a day. I have found that they freeze just fine.
The fact that the cupcake recipes are dairy-free is very helpful for me since I have a dairy allergy.
Criticisms: My only real criticism is that the ingredients are only given in cup measurements and not given by weight. Elana does give you the flour weights for one cup in the introduction, but I still have to look up weights for all other ingredients and calculate the weight of flour for each recipe. I LOVE cookbooks that give a weight for every single ingredient, like Rose Levy Bernanbaum's fabulous books (from the time of my life before I knew about my wheat and dairy allergies!). I believe that all cookbook writers should follow Mrs. Bernanbaum's lead. Finally, one does usually need to sift coconut flour since it naturally clumps in storage. I weigh and then sift (4oz coconut flour = 1 cup). I didn't see sifting mentioned in Elana's book. But this is just nitpicking! The book is great.
I'm hoping that Elana will write a coconut flour cookbook that goes beyond cupcakes, but I thank her A THOUSAND TIMES for this book, that has made following a difficult diet so easy. Muffins are just about the only portable `fast food' (well, besides portable fruits, nut/seed mixtures, and Larabars) that I can have, and as a working mom, I need that convenience. This book helps me add to my repertoire and gives me the knowledge that I need to improvise on my own.
Elana is fabulous!
