If there’s anything I’ve learned about trying new recipes, it’s that it is always a good idea to have a backup plan. Especially when you are experimenting with sugar-free baking. Especially when I am the one doing the baking. Because I can never be satisfied with just finding some tried-and-true sugar-free recipe...I have this insane desire to make all the recipes I love into a sugar-free version. And sometimes it just doesn’t work.
I remember well the early days of sugar-free baking. My younger sister, Patsy, was a Type 1 diabetic and dependent on insulin. This was back in the days when we called it “Juvenile Diabetes”, and doctors thought the main difference was the age at which you developed it. It was a lot harder to control back then, and there weren’t a lot of options for diabetics with a sweet tooth. Almost everything had a chemical aftertaste, and it was always either way too sweet, or not sweet enough. I almost gag every time I think about that pie my mom made one time using a can of sugar-free pineapple pie filling. It was so gross.
These days, there are lots of sugar-free products out on the market, and you can find hundreds of recipes on the internet, but so many of them still lack that special “umph” that a well-seasoned family recipe brings to the table. Store-bought sweets are dull by comparison, and when you’ve enjoyed every Christmas eating a big pile of cinnamon oatmeal cookies, well...Voortman’s brand of hard, dry, oatmeal wafers just don’t cut it.
It wasn’t long after I found out I, too, was diabetic, that I started playing with my family recipes in hopes that I could still eat them. I’ve dabbled with quite a few, and some have turned out much better than others. Take, for instance, the age-old “Jell-o Cake” that I’ve been trying to perfect. It’s never just a matter of swapping sugar for artificial sugar...sometimes it changes the recipe completely. A sugar-free apple pie will wind up too watery because the artificial sweetener doesn’t caramelize while it bakes, and a sugar-free glaze on top of a cake will turn back into crystals when it cools, rather than stay moist and syrupy. So you have to have a bit of knowledge about the chemistry of baking before you begin, and backup options are always a good plan.
And that’s exactly where we’re going with today’s blog post. So, I had a plan to remake my mom’s moist and delicious Jell-O cake using sugar-free Jell-O and the newly discovered, Duncan Hines Keto Yellow Cake Mix. It sounded like it would be easy. The original recipe called for “any” yellow cake mix, combined with the ingredients listed on the box, plus one small box of Jell-O, one extra egg, and an extra ⅓ cup of cooking oil. A sugar-free/Keto version should work pretty much the same, right? Not so much.
If you want to see all my mistakes, and the numerous variations I’ve tried when I made this recipe, head on over to our YouTube channel, but for the sake of brevity, let’s just say there were way too many variables, but I did finally figure it out. In the mean time I had to come up with a backup plan….
Since I promised a sugar-free recipe for the holidays, I thought I’d take a step back and talk about a really yummy sugar-free dessert I made for another holiday...Easter. One of our favorite desserts at Easter has always been my mom’s Banana Pudding, and I never dreamed I would be able to make it sugar-free because it contains a key ingredient that is absolutely not sugar-free -- Eagle Brand Sweetened Condensed Milk. It’s nothing but milk and sugar, right? And I have never seen a sugar-free version of it in any store, so I just assumed it couldn’t be done. That is until I ran across this recipe from Arman Liew at The Big Man’s World. This simple recipe has changed my sugar-free baking forever and has allowed me to cook up many of our family favorites without the worry of too much sugar or carbs. It uses just 3 ingredients and has only 1 net gram of carbs per serving. We’ve tried it with ice cream recipes, Magic Cookie Bar recipes, and, of course, Mom’s delicious banana pudding.
The first time I made this recipe, I had to swap out several ingredients to keep it sugar-free, but they were easy swaps, and did not affect the flavor or consistency of the dessert, so it worked very well for our needs. However, once I sat down to write this blog, I found that one of the key ingredients, Murray brand Sugar-free Nilla Wafers, was no longer available for purchase. There are some sugar-free and/or Keto Nilla Wafers on the market, but I haven’t tried them yet, so I cannot make a recommendation. I also found this simple-looking recipe for homemade Keto Vanilla Wafers that looks like it might be worth trying. In the meantime, if you’re okay with a little sugar (less than 10g per ½ cup serving), you could make the recipe as written above and use the regular Nilla wafers. You could even substitute another type of sugar-free cookie or skip the wafers altogether…the cookies were never my favorite part anyway….
But conquering the sugar in a recipe isn’t the end-all of making our family desserts healthy. A more thorough examination of the nutrition facts revealed that it still wasn’t quite as low-carb as I thought it would be. And that’s one of the hard facts about sugar-free baking -- just because it’s sugar-free, doesn’t mean it’s low carb or even healthy at all. When made to Mom’s specs, I estimate that a ½ cup serving contains about 7g fat, 26g carbs, 195 calories, and almost 3g protein, but when I made it sugar-free, I wound up with 13g fat, 13g carbs, 188 calories, and less than 1g protein. Yes, it was ½ the carbs, but it was still almost the same calories and it had twice the fat. The extra fat came from the homemade condensed milk, and, unfortunately, after the condensed milk, the banana itself was the biggest contributor to the calories and carbs, and what would banana pudding be without the bananas?
At any rate, I’ve included the recipe below. Make it sugar-free, make it fat free, make it the normal way, I think it will still be delicious no matter what you do. Just keep in mind that often when you swap out sugar, something else, like fats are added to make it still taste good, and it’s best to keep a close eye on the nutrition facts before you decide to chow down on the whole bowl.
So the point of all this is to say, sometimes cooking sugar-free is an easy swap that tastes great, and sometimes, it’s more trouble than it’s worth. I will say it was totally worth making the sugar-free version of Mom’s pudding because it was delicious and in the process I discovered the Keto condensed milk recipe, which has made it possible to bake a lot of other things. So my advice is to give experimentation a try. Calculate the time, the expense, the carbs and all the other details to see if it’s worth it and go for it! You never know whether you’ve found the next great family recipe until you try it. And if not, well, hopefully, you made that backup plan….
And now, without further ado, here is Mimi’s Banana Pudding (the almost sugar free version), and I hope you enjoy it as much as we do!
* For the record, I do not know the origin of this recipe. My mom got it from my Aunt Dena, who has long since passed, and we have no idea where she got it from. If you know the original source of this recipe, please send an email with links so I can give credit where credit is due!
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