Low Carb Cake Batter Ice Cream with Frosting Bombs

Cake batter is a relatively new flavor that’s become a staple in many ice cream shops. It’s extremely easy to make since it’s just a sweet cream base plus white or yellow cake mix. Rainbow sprinkles or similar cake decoration candies are usually thrown in for color, added texture, and flavor. As you can probably guess, that’s not going to work for a low carb recipe. Replacing the cake batter is simple to fix. LorAnn Oils sells cake batter ice vream flavoring. I couldn’t find any ready-made rainbow sprinkles that were low carb. I did find one or two recipes to make them, but it looks like too much trouble. Instead, I decided to throw colored frosting in the mix. The frosting is based on my Oreo ice cream adventure. The key to good frosting is to not use granular sweeteners. Powdered erythritol and liquid sucralose (EZ-Sweetz), but no Truvia. These little frosting bombs are very sweet, but remember, they need to be since they’re going to be frozen. The most difficult obstacle I ran into was getting them into some kind of shape I could work with. Vegetable shortening is smooth and creamy and can’t be rolled into clumps. The way I eventually solved this problem is to use the peanut butter cup molds from the Chocolate Almond Butter Bombs recipe. Fill, freeze solid, and then pop them out while frozen, cut up, and mix in the ice cream. Because the primary sweetener is different from the ice cream, their flavor really stands out.

The Myth of the Scientific Method

I referenced Tom Naughton’s excellent presentation “Science for Smart People” in my “What makes a scientist?” post. He calls out the steps of the scientific method to describe the difference between data from an observational study vs. a controlled double-blind experiment. He rightly chastises scientists for not following the scientific method and relying on incomplete observations to determine what is scientific fact. All good science should be done orderly, carefully, and reproducibly. That’s how every important advance in science has been conducted, right? No, not really.

Chocolate Almond Butter Bombs

I had lost 50 pounds on a low carb diet and plateaued. I joined a gym and after a year, I gained 10 pounds. Yes, I’m sure most of it was muscle, but it’s not the direction I was intending to go. It was suggested to me to log all of my food intake using a tool like MyFitnessPal. I was reluctant since, quite frankly, I viewed it as a pain in the ass. Since I didn’t have any other ideas, I started logging everything I ate as meticulously as possible. I was shocked how many carbohydrates (and calories) I was consuming in a day. Yes, I was eating lots of low carb foods like pistachios, but I was sometimes polishing off half a bag in a day. I knew I had to make changes and fix my macro-nutrient ratios. I needed ideas for doing a “fat fast” to kickstart my weight loss again, so I purchased Dana Carpender’s Fat Fast Cookbook: 50 Easy Recipes to Jump Start Your Low Carb Weight Loss. It has lots of great recipes that are 80% - 88% fat. One of these recipes helped change my life: Chocolate Peanut Butter Bombs. With the introduction of these little babies (after a few modifications), I was able to melt off another 50+ pounds.

Cauliflower Fried “Rice” Made Easy

I love cauliflower. It’s an extremely versatile ingredient and can be very tasty. Discovering new ways to incorporate cauliflower into meals becomes a necessity when living a low carb lifestyle. Most people remember the foul smelling cruciferous vegetable when their parents forced them to eat it as a child and never bother to learn how to prepare it properly. (Same with Brussels sprouts, broccoli, kale, spinach, etc.) One of my favorites is using cauliflower as a rice replacement. Chinese fried rice, in particular. Let’s first discuss a few cooking techniques for making traditional Chinese fried rice.

A weirdly, improbably effective cognitive enhancer and treatment for Parkinson’s, ADHD, Tourette’s, and schizophrenia...and weight loss.

Carbohydrate restriction has been identified as a preventative action and potential treatment for a variety of neurological disorders and weight loss. But if you guessed that’s the subject of this post, you’d be wrong.

I recently read the book “Smarter: The New Science of Building Brain Power” by Dan Hurley. It’s an interesting tale of self experimentation to improve human cognitive function. The author reviews a number of methods such as mental training tasks, diet, and drugs and implements a few of them to see if his IQ can be improved through these means. You’re probably now predicting that I will be discussing his dietary findings as they relate to cognitive function, but you’d again be wrong. Instead, I’m going to focus on drugs; one drug in particular. I’m singling this one out because it’s controversial. Its infamy is due to guilt-by-association, kind of like saturated fat. You’d think this demonstrably effective, inexpensive, all-natural, non-habit forming drug would be getting more attention as a potential treatment especially for older folks at risk for dementia, but it probably won’t in my lifetime. It’s nicotine. The demon ingredient that is alleged to make people slaves to cigarettes may be more effective than prescription drugs.

Low Carb Amaretto Ice Cream

A friend of mine had given me bottles of amaretto and kahlúa Da Vinci sugar free syrup many years ago. It was before I knew about low carb, so I stuck them in my liquor cabinet and forgot about them. I discovered them recently and wondered if I could use them in ice cream. Liquor based ice creams are nothing new. In fact, I was planning to make one, but the sugar content of most liquors makes it prohibitive. These sugar free syrups are perfect since they provide the flavor without any of the carbs (or calories).

Low Carb Gluten Free Cookies and Cream Ice Cream

This ice cream flavor was the inspiration for me to tackle Low Carb Oreo Cookies. They were originally just a means to an end, since I wasn’t sure I’d succeed in an Oreo clone that would stand up on its own. Fortunately, they taste good as a snack and work beautifully as an ice cream additive. The idea of crushing up Oreos and adding them to ice cream dates back to somewhere around the 1970’s. “Cookies and Cream” quickly shot up into the top five ice cream flavors by 1983 (allegedly).