Celebrating Elise's Birthday with Paleo Desserts

Well I find it amusing that last week I wrote about how we avoid sickness, and now my children are fighting mild colds for the first time in months. At the same time I am not super surprised because they have been loaded with sugar for the past week and a half. I almost never let my children have sugar. It just isn't part of our regular diet. However, with the celebration of many birthdays and events recently they kept getting offered special treats in situations where I struggled with saying no. Anyway, the little sweeties are now suffering the consequences and I continue to wrestle through the question of when to let them indulge a little and when to put my foot down.

On the day I am writing this they will also be eating birthday cake to celebrate my seven year old's birthday. My original plan for her birthday was two simple desserts that come from Paleo diet recipes. That means that in addition to being very lightly sweetened,  they are grain free. Both of these desserts are things I can feel very good about giving my children for a special occasion treat. The problem comes when they are already loaded down with sweet after sweet. What would normally be something very easy for their systems to tolerate I know will now just make them feel worse. But I can't deprive my sweet girl of birthday cake on her birthday. It will just be a very small slice this year and then NO sweets again for quite some time to let their systems recover!

I would like to share with you the link to one of the desserts I made for Elise's birthday in case you are looking for a healthier birthday treat for your family. This recipe is for a coconut flour cake. I made the cake according to the directions but used honey in place of agave and reduced it to just 1 Cup. I also omitted the orange zest since Joel can't do citrus. I made a coconut butter frosting sweetened with raw honey instead of the frosting listed. The original frosting is made from chocolate chips which have a decent amount of sugar and I really wanted no sugar if possible. Here is what I did for our frosting:

Coconut Butter Frosting

* I mixed 4 C dried coconut flakes in our food processor for about 15 minutes to get a creamy coconut butter.

* I then added about 1/4 C raw honey, 1 tsp vanilla and about 2 Tbsp cocoa powder (mostly to produce a lightly brown colored frosting) and mixed thoroughly.

* My frosting was a little do dry so I added coconut milk to get to my desired consistency.


If I were to do it again I would use this process for making the coconut butter and then mix in the other ingredients. I think this would have produced a smoother frosting. Ours still tasted delicious though!

Anyway, there you have it for our special birthday cake recipe. This was my first time making this cake and I will for sure make it again for future birthdays. It was moist and tasted amazing! Let me know if you try either of these recipes and what you think!

UPDATE: I wrote this over the weekend and now I am very thankful to say that the kids' colds seem to have been very uneventful and very short lived! I still think we'll steer clear of sweet treats for a while though :).