I can barely contain my excitement! The following is a guest post written by one of my favorite food bloggers, Arsy of Rubies & Radishes. Arsy is a gifted food photographer, and her recipes are always scrumptious. Today she’s sharing a recipe for grain-free macadamia chocolate chip cupcakes. Thanks, Arsy!
Hello Food Renegades! I am delighted to be here, sharing a recipe that I developed just for you! I wanted to come up with a grain-free “treat” that would leave you satisfied and full of nutrients.
The macadamia nut butter in this recipe adds the protein and healthy fat needed to stay full. Just one of these cupcakes can get me through the morning. Macadamia nuts are also my nut of choice because they have a very low Omega-6 content compared to their counterparts. In addition, they are a healthy source of magnesium, manganese, thiamine, copper and iron.
These cupcakes were also toddler tested, making them a perfect dessert for a birthday party!
Macadamia Chocolate Chip Cupcakes
The Players
- ½ cup coconut flour (where to buy coconut flour)
- 1 tablespoon arrowroot powder (where to buy arrowroot powder)
- ¼ teaspoon sea salt (where to buy American sea salt)
- ½ teaspoon baking soda
- 4 eggs (from pastured hens)
- 1/4 cup honey (where to buy organic, raw honey)
- 2 teaspoons vanilla extract (where to buy real vanilla extract)
- 1/4 cup macadamia butter (where to buy organic macadamia butter)
- 1/3 cup butter, melted (where to buy butter from grass-fed cows)
- 1/4 cup chocolate chips (where to buy soy-free chocolate chips)
- 1/4 cup shredded coconut (where to buy unsweetened coconut)
- homemade whipped cream or coconut cream for topping
The How-To
1) Preheat the oven to 350°F.
2) In a bowl, combine the coconut flour, arrowroot powder and salt.
3) In a different bowl, whisk eggs. Then add honey, vanilla extract, macadamia butter and butter and mix thoroughly.
4) Add your dry ingredients to your wet ingredients. Whisk until all the ingredients are thoroughly blended.
5) Let your batter sit for 5-10 minutes. This will give the coconut flour a chance to adsorb more of the liquids.
6) Add in baking soda, chocolate chips and shredded coconut. Mix until baking soda is mixed through.
7) Place 9 cupcakes liners in a muffin tin. Loosely fill the liners all the way with your batter.
8) Bake for 18-20 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.
9) Remove cupcakes from the muffin pan or tip the cupcakes on their side and let cool for 20-30 minutes.
10) Top with whipped cream and serve!
Enjoy!
For delicious dessert recipes created by an award-winning pastry chef similar to this one (dairy-free and grain-free), I highly recommend the Paleo Sweets Cookbook.
It’s got 73 mouthwatering recipes for healthy desserts, including:
- Grain-Free Oreos,
- Key Lime Pie,
- Grain-Free Snickerdoodles,
- Double Chocolate Hazelnut Cake, and more!
At the moment, the printed version of this cookbook is 100% free to Food Renegade readers. You just cover shipping & handling.
Meet Arsy
Arsy Vartanian is the author and chef of the paleo recipe & lifestyle blog, Rubies & Radishes and the cookbook, The Paleo Slow Cooker.
In an effort to achieve optimal health and wellness, she discovered Crossfit & the paleo diet in 2008. Arsy started feeling better than ever and was eventually able to recover from health issues that she had struggled with for almost a decade. Equipped with this energy and knowledge, Rubies & Radishes was born.
When Arsy is not busy at her day job or being a mom to her young baby, you can find her in her kitchen developing healthy recipes for her family and her blog readers.
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I wish you would get off the grain free train. I realize that this the latest trend but in my opinion it is just a way to modify something that probably isn’t good for you in the first place. And let’s be honest, this is not paleo.
Well, I’m not (nor have I ever been) a Paleo eater, so that’s no problem. 🙂
The reason I post grain-free recipes so often is because I’m lazy. I used to sprout & ferment my grains, but I’ve found that somewhere between the second and third child I just don’t plan that far ahead! Having grain-free recipes enables me to make tasty treats when the whim strikes without having a guilty conscience about how the recipe didn’t use sprouted flour or a sourdough starter culture.
(And as another plus, it helps out my readers who are on healing protocol diets like GAPS.)
I’m certainly not anti-grain, and there are a number of grain-based recipes on the site as well as a number of posts about how to eat and prepare grains in a healthy way.
We buy real sourdough bread from a local baker to make sandwiches for our lunches. We cook with rice for a dinner at least once per week, and my kids even eat oatmeal for breakfast at least four mornings a week.
But I’m not going to keep a sourdough starter or sprout my grains and grind them like I used to. I’ve got nothing against doing that, it just doesn’t fit into my life right now.
So, all that said, I’m sorry you don’t like the recipes. But I want grain-free recipes for when I’m not planning ahead, and many of my readers *need* them. So, I’m certainly not going to stop posting them!
Yes, please keep posting the grain free, dairy free recipes. I am diabetic and have cholesterol problems. The sugar I can always substitute with stevia drops that only contain distilled stevia with grape seed extract as preservative so it isn’t bad. One cup sugar = 12 drops of the liquid Stevita.
Melly
Good for you Kristen! It is impossible to please everyone and I love having this recipe for myself and for my friends who have celiac disease or diabetes. There is always room for any type of creative recipe in my opinion. I find that as I get older and find out what I react to, some of my determined beliefs as to what is healthy have changed and probably will continue to do so….Thanks for posting!
LOVE LOVE LOVE the grain free recipes! I find blogs like yours *so valuable* because I know that when you do post grain free recipes, they will be real food based and full of integrity (as it relates to my own personal diet- in other words, they work for me and I trust them). You are providing a major service for those of us who, for medical/health reasons need to minimize or quit grains temporarily or permanently. Also, *love* it when RF folks and Paleo folks get together for a common cause. Great to see that here : )
Perfect timing I just bought a big can of Macadamia nuts,they are salted so I will use only half of the salt,life is to short for me to be totally gluten free and not have a weekly treat,I look forward to it and if you exercise then its fine.I pass the Cupcakes stores in my area and think to myself how unhealthy to eat those even if its on occasion.Wheat is a cheap grain that is good for no one.PERIOD.
Thank you
Melissa
I love your postings and I have followed food renegade for a while now. However, I found these to be quite dry after I cooked them. I followed all the directions, but for some reason when I use coconut flour it is very dry and is hard to keep eating because it makes your throat so dry. I wonder how you would modify this to make it more moist and less like a dry, cake batter. Thanks!
Hi Josh,
Perhaps if you add another egg. Coconut flour needs a lot of moisture, as it soaks it up like a sponge. I just now found this email recipe, so haven’t made them yet, but have used coconut flour for quite awhile and do like it.
We get pastured eggs that aren’t always big, so if a recipe calls for 3 eggs, and they’re smaller than normal, I’ll throw in another egg or even two, depending.
I see nothing wrong with posting non grain recipes. If I recall correctly no grain is a good thing for celiacs.
I just had the strangest experience. I couldn’t find macadamia nut butter so I used sunflower seed butter. Otherwise everything was the same. I baked up a batch, we ate half and set the other half out on our neighborhood sharing table. We’re a distribution point for Community-Supported Animal Husbandry, and also share backyard produce and treats. When I went to get the leftovers a couple of hours later, they had turned a vivid green throughout! Do you know why they would have done this? Have I poisoned my neighbors? Anyone in need of a dramatic science fair experiment?
Totally normal, sunflower butter turns green when baked in recipes, Sarah on The Paleo Mom gave an explanation of the science.
“SunButter is the brand name of a sunflower-seed spread, made by SunGold Foods, a division of Red River Commodities, a group that specializes in sunflower products for people and birds. SunButter is processed in plants that have never seen a peanut, so it’s claim to fame is that it is a peanut-butter substitute that will not cause adverse peanut reactions. (It may contain soy lecithin, however.)
Now, about that green thing. All plants contain chlorogenic acid, mostly in the stems and leaves, but sunflowers also have it in the seeds. A spokeswoman for Red River Commodities says that SunButter does indeed turn cookies and other baked products green as they cool. The solution, she says, is to reduce the amount of baking soda or baking powder in your recipe by almost half, which balances the acidity of the ingredients and keeps them from changing color. Whether your cookies will rise adequately with half the leaven is a good question, but she says some people who have gotten in touch with the company say they don’t notice any difference. Adding a bit of lemon juice to your dough or batter can also help maintain expected colors.
The Red River spokeswoman also says there are a number of recipes at the company site that have been engineered to be delicious and color-appropriate, including an Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookie that will not turn green. http://www.ochef.com/1267.htm
G’day! Love the combination, true!
Your recipe and photos are inspiring…healthy and look YUM too!
Cheers! Joanne
It was only recently that I found foodrenegade.com and was delighted to see good, healthy recipes. I’m not celiac but am gluten intolerant, and feel most people are (due to the wheat being hybridized over the last many years – $$$) but lots of people don’t have any outward signs – yet – although it may catch up with them.
Today’s foods are being so contaminated that it’s difficult (and takes time) to search out and be sure you’re eating clean. I spend most of my time in the kitchen preparing everything from scratch, and trying to learn how to make a few foods we’ve missed out on when I decided to go gluten free. I could do without the treats, but my husband does miss some things, so it’s wonderful finding sites like this who devote so much time and effort trying to help those of us who don’t have time to develop special recipes.
I feel if there are those who aren’t interested, or feel deprived by not eating the grains, then don’t spend time here; there are a LOT of sites and cookbooks with traditional offerings. I don’t waste my time looking at sites with foods I wouldn’t eat – sugar, grains, processed items, etc.
Thanks, Kristen
Yikes, I just realized this post is older when I happened to notice the dates. This was just in my email today, Dec. 20, and never noticed the dates on the other posts. That’s what I get for not reading ‘everything.’ :o)
I’m excited to try this recipe because macadamia nuts are my favorite! Thank you for posting it for those, like me, who either have the auto immune disease Celiac or a severe gluten allergy. We aren’t just following some stupid trend or fad diet. Grains haven’t been my friend for awhile now. I can’t even tolerate quinoa anymore so I really appreciate the creative grain free alternatives.
So please…keep posting 🙂
These look yummy! I think I need to try this recipe soon. 🙂