Desserts – Healthy And Tasty

If you want to eat healthily, you don’t have to do without sweets. With just a few tricks, desserts can be made so healthy that they become the purest superfoods. So you will not only find desserts that you are allowed to eat in exceptional cases.

Desserts – only with healthy sweeteners

Desserts should taste sweet. This characteristic alone leads many people to believe that sweet foods are automatically unhealthy. Because the sweetness in most desserts comes from household sugar (also known as granulated sugar, industrial sugar, refined sugar, or white sugar). And that sugar doesn’t have a good reputation.

It not only irritates the blood sugar level but is generally considered a risk factor for a variety of diseases (e.g. lung cancer, breast cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, fatty liver, dyslipidemia, high blood pressure, etc.) and is also not very helpful for intelligence.

But you can conjure up a sweet taste very well without table sugar – simply by using healthy sweeteners: The nine healthiest sweeteners.

These include, for example, dried fruit, yacon syrup, yacon powder, stevia, red banana powder, or coconut blossom sugar.

Another healthy sweetener is lucuma, a fruit from the Andes that, when dried and powdered, has a very fine sweet aroma and is particularly suitable for shakes, smoothies, and desserts.

These amaranth and hazelnut balls, for example, are sweetened with yacon syrup, the poppy seed, and orange cakes with coconut blossom sugar, and these walnut tea biscuits are sweetened with xylitol. With xylitol, be careful not to give your dog any of the biscuits. Xylitol can be fatal to dogs.

Desserts – only with healthy flour

In addition to sugar, wheat flour is usually another important ingredient in desserts – and in most cases, it is an extract flour (wheat flour type 405), i.e. a flour that consists almost exclusively of starch and protein and contains only very few vital substances and roughage.

Compared to wholemeal flour, for example, wheat flour only delivers

• 13% of the amount of vitamin B1,
• 17% of the amount of vitamin B2,
• 14% of the amount of vitamin B3,
• 35% of the amount of vitamin B6,
• 20% of the amount of folic acid,
• 20% of the amount of vitamin E and
• 18% of the magnesium amount

Desserts – Wheat-free, low-gluten, or gluten-free

At the same time, wheat flour is very rich in gluten. Gluten is the protein in wheat. Many people are sensitive to it. This is then referred to as gluten sensitivity. In the rarest of cases, this is celiac disease, which is accompanied by severe digestive problems after gluten consumption and can only be managed with a gluten-free diet.

However, most people with gluten sensitivity experience discomfort after eating gluten without suffering from celiac disease. One then speaks of a celiac disease-independent gluten sensitivity. For many years it was believed that this was esoteric hocus-pocus, which those affected only imagine because they had read something about it at some point. In the meantime, however, various scientists have devoted themselves to the phenomenon and have been able to prove that celiac disease-independent gluten sensitivity does exist and is not based on imagination.

Gluten can cause a variety of symptoms in those affected. Some chronic diseases can also worsen as a result of gluten consumption or develop in the first place (multiple sclerosis, autism, Hashimoto, allergies, etc.). However, a gluten-free diet is not always necessary. Unless you have celiac disease, a low-gluten or wheat-free diet is often sufficient.

Spelled, for example, also contains gluten and even more than wheat. However, spelled gluten is apparently much better tolerated by many people, so in these cases, a wheat-free diet often leads to an improvement in the symptoms.

Healthy desserts should therefore be wheat-free, low-gluten, or gluten-free, depending on personal tolerance, e.g. For example, these berry muffins made from buckwheat and almond flour.

Nut flour & protein powder instead of flour

In healthy desserts, you can often swap out the flour for other foods, either in whole or in part. Nut flour, almond flour, tiger nut flour, or vegetable protein powder are suitable for this. Nut and almond flours in particular are popular flour alternatives in paleo cuisine.

Nut and almond flour are not ground nuts and almonds, but ground leftovers from nut or almond oil production. This means that nut and almond flours are significantly lower in fat compared to whole nuts and almonds and instead provide proportionately more protein. The packaging therefore often says “de-oiled”.

Tigernut flour, on the other hand, simply consists of ground tiger nuts. These are the small nodules of a type of grass that is native to the Mediterranean region. Tigernuts are low in fat, high in fiber, and taste very delicious – a bit like almonds, hence the name. Tigernut flour is one of the main ingredients in these gluten-free waffles.

Plant-based protein powders include, on the one hand, the very protein-rich rice and pea proteins, each with a protein content of over 80 percent, and on the other hand, the hemp and lupine proteins, both of which have a protein content of 40 – 50 percent, and the pumpkin seed and sunflower seed proteins, each with a protein content of 55 percent.

Although the protein powders can also be used in cakes and pastries, they are particularly popular in shakes, smoothies, and desserts, e.g. B. in this protein shake with kale and fruit.

If the conventional flour is replaced by protein powder, then the protein content of the respective dessert increases enormously, while the carbohydrate content decreases at the same time. In this way, the dessert can become a low-carb recipe.

Coconut flour and flour mixes

Coconut flour can also be used. However, you have to make sure that you ensure that there is enough liquid in the recipe at the same time. Because coconut flour binds a lot of water and – if there is not enough liquid in the recipe – the pastry crumbles.

Flour mixtures are also often used, as each flour has different properties, e.g. B. in this chocolate cake. Here, teff flour and rice flour are mixed.

Desserts – only with healthy fats and oils

Most cakes will probably use regular spreadable margarine or butter. The latter is out of the question if you want to bake and cook vegan. Conventional margarine, on the other hand, contains a wide variety of ingredients that not everyone wants in their homemade dessert (whey components, emulsifiers, flavorings, etc.).

Coconut oil is also a very fine oil that can be used well in desserts. Not only does it give off a wonderful aroma, but it is also very heat-resistant, so you could even fry it if you wanted to.

Desserts without eggs

Usually, “normal” cakes and tarts and also many desserts cannot do without eggs.

Cream of tartar instead of baking soda

Baking powder usually contains a phosphate of synthetic origin. Many people would like to avoid phosphates, as they are already abundant in conventional nutrition (in milk and grain products, in meat and sausages, and in soft drinks). Also, phosphates could cause some people to have trouble concentrating and paying attention, which is something that’s been talked about in children with ADHD.

Cream of tartar, on the other hand, is a natural product and also gives baked goods a much milder taste than baking powder.