Basing on the idea of this small cheesecakes, I’ve made this cacao cream cheese muffins. Using absolutely no flour, so for all of you who are gluten intolerant or on ketogenic diet, this recipe will be a good option. They are very easy and fairly cheap to make, you can upgrade them using low sugar chocolate chips or white chocolate chips – they will melt nicely giving extra chocolate flavour.

Comparing to the cream cheese cupcakes from that recipe, this one came out completely different. The other ones were very moist, more like real cheesecake. These ones, are very light and fluffy and quite dry, almost like sponge cake. They don’t have eggy taste, and a bit of crunchy walnut on top gives them a bit of nutty flavour.

The same as the other small cheesecakes, they rise nicely during baking, to sadly deflate when the temperature goes down. Why this happens? – you can read right here.

I’ve used raw cacao powder, it’s slightly different in taste (more about difference between cacao and cocoa you can read here), but regular cocoa will work as well, although you might need to use more sweetener, because in my opinion roasted cocoa is much more bitter than the raw one. Also instead of clarified butter, you can add a tablespoon of melted coconut oil. I prefer butter – in my opinion it works much better than coconut oil. For example I’ve been making keto courgette cake and keto chocolate courgette cake with butter and with coconut oil, and the last one always gives the cake that weird oily taste and like it settles on the bottom of the cake. It’s hard to explain, but maybe you’ve noticed that as well. Like the oil couldn’t combine with the rest of the ingredients. While butter not only gives nice flavour, but seems to combine very well with the rest of ingredients.

I’ve also used handmade liners, which is a very handy idea and I think I won’t be buying muffin liners any more.

cacao cream cheese muffins (keto, no flour, gluten free)

INGREDIENTS:

• 300g cream cheese
• 3 large eggs
• 2 tbsp raw cacao powder
• 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 5 tbsp xylitol (or other sugar replacement) or more – they are not very sweet
• 1 tbsp clarified butter
• optionally: handful of walnuts

DIRECTIONS

Melt the butter and leave it to cool down. Beat the eggs with xylitol until light and fluffy using handheld mixer. Add cacao powder, baking powder, butter and cream cheese. Beat again until all the ingredients will combine. You will get quite runny consistency.

Prepare muffin tray and liners. If you don’t have them cut baking paper in about 5-6 inches (15cm) squares and give them a muffin liners shape using a glass turned upside down. It’s very easy and you can get as big (in height) muffin liners as you want.

Preheat the oven to 180°C.

Pour the batter to each form and place a piece of walnut on top. I’ve managed to fill up full tray of muffins and had leftovers of batter for another few. If you want to make just one round use 2 eggs instead of 3.

Bake them for about 20-25 minutes. They will rise nicely, and deflate later on, that’s normal, so don’t you worry about that.

After baking let them cool down slowly by opening slightly the oven. This way they won’t deflate so much. They can be stored in a room temperature for about 3 days.

Enjoy!