When I was first diagnosed with Celiac disease, it wasn’t the pizza, pasta or sandwiches that I was most devastated about cutting out (weird, I know), it was actually the dessert.  For anyone that knows my family, the King family desserts are slightly famous (at least in Summerland).

Lucky for me, when I had to switch to gluten free, my Mom was up for a challenge, and completely taught herself how to bake gluten free.  We would typically treat ourselves to dessert after Sunday family dinners, and now that I am not living at home, I still sometimes bake something fun for Sunday evenings.  BUT, now that I’ve entered the nutrition world and understand how sugar wreaks havoc on our body, it’s important to me that the desserts I make and eat are a healthier version – as little refined sugars as possible and where I can, gluten and dairy free.

Chocolate lava cake (or chocolate anything) is probably one of my favourite desserts of all time.  So for today’s dessert, I modified a regular lava cake to make a healthier version, which also happens to be gluten and dairy free.  Side note: It’s only healthy if you don’t make and consume 3 batches, which may or may not have been what happened this weekend.

There are a ton of different gluten free flours that you can substitute for regular flour, and each one works best with different types of cooking.  For this dish, I used a combination of Coconut Flour and Almond Flour.  I used the almond flour as it has a higher amount of protein.  If you are having something sweet, you want to have some protein and fat to balance the blood sugar spike.  Coconut flour is one of my go-to gluten free flours as I just really like the flavour of it.

For the sweetener, I used Coconut Sugar  that I ground up to make it the consistency of regular icing sugar.  Coconut sugar is lower on the Glycemic index vs regular sugar (so again, less of a blood sugar spike), and is also a less processed and refined form of sugar, and I always like to be eating food in its most natural form possible.  The chocolate that I used is by the Camino brand and is one of my favourites since it is dairy free.  I used the 55% dark, but depending how sweet you like it, you could use an even darker version, like 70%.

The massive tub you see in the picture is Coconut Oil.  Coconut oil will have its own separate post, as there are so many health benefits, not limited to just cooking and baking.  Coconut oil is a saturated fat (solid at room temp), which is why it works really well as a butter replacement.  What is so great though is that it’s a medium chained triglyceride, which means that in digestion it is sent more directly to your liver to be converted into energy, vs being stored as fat.

Now, before I write out the recipe, I do want to tell you the secret to the “molten” in the lava cake.  I stuck one square of the Camino chocolate into the middle of the batter of the ramekin, before cooking it.  It makes it that extra bit gooier (yes that is a word).