3 Ingredient Carb-Free Banting Pancakes #BantingInKorea

I have been on the Banting diet (along with the rest of South Africa it seems!) for the past 5 weeks and nothing I have ever done, exercise or diet wise, has done for my body what this eating plan has done for me. I can't believe how my body has changed and responded to it. BUT as with any eating plan, it may not be right for you so please don't feel like this is the only way to loose a little bot of jiggle around your middle. Also I would like to note that I have been exercising very little so far, and my now confirmed 4kg loss has been all due to this eating plan and not from going crazy at the gym. If you want to find out more about  Banting, click here to read an interview I did with The Banting Blondes.

3 Ingredient Pancakes (especially for the Banting Diet)

Here is one of my favourite Banting breakfasts. It's super quick and easy and tastes heavenly (even better than the 'real' flour filled pancakes). Today Farmboy changed things up and added a flaxseeds to our mixture which helped them hold together better, as they tend to be quite fragile in the pan. But that's up to you.

Also, cream cheese is quite expensive not only here in Korea but all over the world. But once you try these you won't want to eat anything else.

Ingredients

Makes 4 medium sized pancakes

-1/2 tub of standard cream cheese

-3 eggs

-dash of cinnamon

optional: teaspoon of Xylitol sweetner (I found mine online through iHerb...$11 for 450g)

Directions

Simply mix all your ingredient together in a blender (or by hand if you have the muscle power). One everything is well mixed, grease up a pan with coconut oil and start cooking!

I find my mixture can be very hard to work with as it is very fragile in the pan. Make sure to use lots of coconut oil (I ordered mine off iHerb) to make your life easier when it comes to flipping your pancakes.

Top with a sprinkle of cocoa powder if you need something chocolatey, or with a teeny bit of honey (remember your honey allowance for the day is only 1 teaspoon).

Blueberry Chocolate Banana Bread {recipe}

After the success of my last cranberry chocolate chip banana bread recipe (and the fact that I had 5 bananas that were so black and nasty, they were about the walk themselves outside) I adapted the recipe to include some blueberries. It's blueberry season here in Korea, and boy oh boy did those blueberries not jus make this my best banana bread yet! 

I love that this recipe is so versatile. You can change up the flour (I substituted some buck wheat flour in this mixture to reduce the carb count...hubby is still not sure about me trying to make sweet treats healthy so I am going about it slowly so hopefully he doesn't notice). You can also use any other fruit you would prefer instead of the blueberries. Cranberries have worked well, apple would be good too. And you can add in any extras that yo fancy too, like almonds, walnuts or cinnamon.

PREP: 5 MINS COOKING TIME: 30MINS - 1 HOUR 

-it again took a VERY long time for my bread to cook, but that is because I have a little oven that gets hot very quickly and tends to burn things on the top without cooking through. I would put the timer on for 20 minutes and then check your bread every 5 minutes after that. You will be able to see whats going on in your oven, and you also know if you have a decent 'will-cook-through-without-burning' oven. You want the bread to be moist, but cooked. Dry banana bread is horrid. So keep testing with a sharp knife. If it pulls away clean, your bread is ready. If it comes away with even a little gooey dough on the knife, leave it in for a few more minutes.

INGREDIENTS

-3/4 ripe bananas, smashed (my banana were black black black, had been frozen and then thawed and worked absolutely perfectly! No need to freeze yours, mine were just sitting in the freezer until I could find a use for them).

-1/3 cup coconut oil (you can use butter if you don't have coconut oil)

-1/2 cup brown sugar sugar 

-1 egg, beaten

-1 teaspoon vanilla

-1 teaspoon baking soda

-pinch of salt

-1 1/2 cups all purpose flour (I used 1 cup of regular cake flour and half a cup of buckwheat flour to make it a tiny bit less full of carbs)

-handful of blueberries

-handful (and a half!) of chocolate chips/any chocolate

METHOD

No need for a mixer, a bowl and wooden spoon are more than adequate. 

Preheat your oven to 180C. 

With a wooden spoon, mix your coconut oil into the mashed banana. Add the sugar, egg and vanilla. Sprinkle the baking soda and salt over the mixture and mix in. Add the flour last, and sprinkle in the chocolate chips and cranberries (and anything else you feel like adding...flaked almonds & cinnamon are good extras). 

Pour the mixture into a buttered (I used coconut oil again) loaf pan.

Bake for 1 hour, placing on a rack to cool.

Let me know if you try this at home, you can tag me on Instagram (@roxypearce) or on Facebook :)

White Chocolate Chip Cranberry Cookies {recipe}

This  yummy cookie recipe is simple to prepare and all the ingredients can be found here in South Korea. I ordered my cranberries off Gmarket (click here) and the white chocolate was given to me by a friend (she also got it here in South Korea, I think at one of the foreign food markets in Itaewon) you could use any chocolate, but it's baking chocolate that gives these cookies their creamy chocolatey taste.

Ingredients

1 cup butter softened to room temperature

1/2 cup coconut oil (used in place of shortening)

1 1/2 cups dark brown sugar

1/2 cup granulated sugar

2 large eggs

4 teaspoons vanilla extract

4 1/3 cups all-purpose flour

2 tablespoons corn starch (also called corn powder in Korea)

2 teaspoons baking soda

1 teaspoon salt

1 cup chocolate (chips or a bar chopped up)

1 teaspoon salt

{These ingredients made a lot of dough. Enough for me to make about 25 cookies, fill a large dish for a cheesecake base and still have enough dough frozen for about another 15 cookies. The great thing is you can freeze any left over dough for up to 3 months.}

Method

1. Mix butter, coconut oil and sugars until light and fluffy.

2. Add eggs and vanilla and mix until well combined.

3. Combine flour, corn starch, baking soda and salt and mix together.

4. Mix dry ingredients slowly into wet ingredients and blend well.

5. Dough should not be sticky (mine was because of the coconut oil and the humidity here in Korea) so I added a little more flour. If your dough is crumbly add in 1 teaspoon of water until it just holds together.

6. Add in chocolate until evenly distributed.

7. Roll into a log ( I had to to put my into the fridge to harden slightly as my dough was very sticky, simply place it into the fridge for 30 mins to make it easier to handle). Wrap in cling wrap, place in the freezer for 2 hours (it can be kept for up to 3 months).

8. When ready to bake, heat up your oven to 180C and slice your dough log into small round disks and place onto wax paper. Bake for 15 minutes.

Allow to cool and serve.

*please excuse this blurry photo

I also used this dough as a base for the cheescake I made for Farmboys birthday. It worked like a charm! I will be posting the recipe for it soon, but here is what the dough looked like when rolled out and placed in a dish, baked in the oven for 15 minutes and waiting for it its cheesecake layer:

Happy baking!

Banana Bread with cranberries & chocolate chips {recipe}

Here in South Korea it is a little tricky to get hold of most 'normal' baking ingredients (like butter for example). What tends to happen is that when you do find the item(s) you have searched for for weeks, you have to fork out double, more often triple, the price of it back home. So baking tends to be expensive. And that's why buying a small bag of 4 homemade cookie at the local bakeries costs nearly R60 or $6...outrageous.

So I have been doing a lot of baking in our new oven. And what I have been making an awful lot of is banana bread. It's delicious, quick, and the blacker the bananas (the more rotten they are, the sweeter they are for your bread!) the cheaper they are in the shops...it's a win win really.

So I'm going to post the original recipe here, and next to it I will post what I substituted with, or rather what I could get my hands on at the time.

Also, I am a little slap dash when it comes to cooking. I am not a patient person, and often will just start baking without checking if I even have all the ingredients in the cupboard. In which case I improvise. My friends are horrified when they find out that I use my eye to measure things, but they never complain about the final product. It's always yummy. It works for me but it's not everyone's cup of sugar :)

Prep: 5 mins Cooking Time: 30mins - 1 hour 

-it took a VERY long time for my bread to cook, but that is because I have a little oven that gets hot very quickly and tends to burn things on the top without cooking through. I would put the timer on for 20 minutes and then check your bread every 5 minutes after that. You will be able to see whats going on in your oven, and you also know if you have a decent 'will-cook-through-without-burning' oven. You want the bread to be moist, but cooked. Dry banana bread is horrid. So keep testing with a sharp knife. If it pulls away clean, your bread is ready. If it comes away with even a little gooey dough on the knife, leave it in for a few more minutes.

Ingredients

-3/4 ripe bananas, smashed (I used about 7 smaller bananas that had been sitting around for a good couple of weeks to ensure maximum ripeness)

-1/3 cup butter (I used a good few solid chunks of coconut oil heated quickly until softin a small pan)

-1 cup sugar (I used 2 small tablespoons and added a few more chocolate chips for added sweetness)

-1 egg, beaten

-1 teaspoon vanilla (I could only find vanilla powder and used a good heaped teaspoon)

-1 teaspoon baking soda

-pinch of salt

-1 1/2 cups all purpose flour (I used 1 cup of whole wheat flour and half a cup of almond flour I had left over from here)

-handful of cranberries

-handful (and a half!) of chocolate chips

Method

No need for a mixer, a bowl and wooden spoon are more than adequate. 

Preheat your oven to 180C. 

With a wooden spoon, mix your butter (coconut oil) into the mashed banana. Add the sugar, egg and vanilla. Sprinkle the baking soda and salt over the mixture and mix in. Add the flour last, and sprinkle in the chocolate chips and cranberries (and anything else you feel like adding...flaked almonds & cinnamon are good extras). 

Pour the mixture into a buttered (I used coconut oil again) loaf pan.

Bake for 1 hour, placing on a rack to cool.

Original recipe from SimplyRecipes.