Oatcakes Revisited: Chocolate Oatcake Recipe

One of my first posts on Seed was a recipe review of Oatcakes from Heidi Swanson’s Super Natural Every Day. I didn’t give you the recipe, however, because I didn’t want to copy it directly from the book. Then I thought, Heidi Swanson’s lovely blog, 101 Cookbooks, is essentially a log of Heidi cooking from other people’s cookbooks and recording what she thought about them and the modifications she made.

Well, I made some modifications to the Oatcake recipe. I added chocolate. Really, what isn’t better with chocolate. Just remember that oatcakes are traditionally a little dry (unless you heat them up), very dense, but very tasty. They will fill you up.

Chocolate Oatcake Recipe
(adapted from Oatcakes in Super Natural Every Day by Heidi Swanson)

Ingredients:

3 C. Old fashioned rolled oats
2 C. Spelt or whole wheat pastry flour*
1/2 t. Baking powder (the original recipe calls for aluminum-free)
2 t. Fine grain sea salt
3 T. Cocoa powder
3/4 C. Chopped pecans or walnuts, lightly toasted
1/3 C. Extra-virgin coconut oil**
1/3 C. Unsalted butter
3/4 C. Maple syrup
1/2 C. Natural cane sugar
2 Eggs, lightly beaten

Instructions:

• Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F. Prepare a standard 12 cup muffin tin, by generously buttering the cups.
• Combine oats, flour, baking powder, cocoa powder, and pecans in a large mixing bowl.
• Combine coconut oil, butter, maple syrup, and sugar in a saucepan over low heat. Stir until the butter melts and the sugar dissolves. Take care not to get the mixture too hot as the eggs will cook in the next step. This may take 5-10 minutes on low heat.
• Add the warm sugar mixture to the oat mixture and stir a bit.
• Add the eggs and stir until everything is combined into a wet dough.
• Spoon the dough into the muffin cups until almost full.
• Bake for 25-30 minutes until firm.
• Remove the pan from the oven and let cool before tipping them onto a cooling rack. Run a knife along the edges if the cakes don’t pop out on their own.
• Serve warm or at room temperature.

* Spelt flour and whole wheat pastry flour can usually be found at a health food store. Occasionally Publix or another large chain store will stock it in the Greenwise or natural ingredients section.** Coconut oil can also be found in the health food section of Publix and the health food store. It comes as a slightly solid state that melts very easily around room temperature. I have not detected a strong coconut taste when using it and find that it doesn’t burn as easily as olive oil at medium to high temperatures.

Omissions from the original recipe: Heidi’s recipe also calls for 1/4 C. flax seeds. I simply didn’t have them on hand and didn’t use flax seed meal because it makes the cakes too dry.

From Super Natural Every Day: Oat Cakes Recipe Review

**Update: I posted my version of Heidi Swanson’s Oatcakes in a new post. I added chocolate. Yum.**

I spent the weekend with Super Natural Everyday: Well-Loved Foods from my Natural Foods Kitchen by Heidi Swanson, keeper of my favorite cooking blog. This is her latest book, released last week. It arrived on my doorstep via Amazon.com on Friday – two days before expected – and just in time for the weekend. It took me about a day and a half to go through this and her other book pictured below.

By mid-morning Sunday, I was ready to cook, choosing the best recipe for a Sunday snack. Oat Cakes. Oat Cakes, indeed! My husband liked them so much he posted a photo of them on Facebook with a status reading “I ate two of these”. These fantastic little treats are the size of a normal muffin, but feel twice as dense and filled me up twice as fast. I ate one for breakfast today and wasn’t hungry for hours! The original recipe calls for walnuts and flax seeds which are both high in Omega Fatty Acids. The whole rolled oats makes for a great texture and the amaranth flour adds an additional nutty taste. I will say that until you are familiar with baking/cooking with grains other than wheat, stick to the recipe. My oat cakes came out a bit dry as soon as they cooled down, but it was my own fault. I didn’t have whole flax seeds and substituted ground flax seed (flax meal) instead, which was like adding a 1/3 C. of something the consistency of flour when it should have been just whole seed. As for the nuts, I substituted pecans where the original called for walnuts just because I have a stockpile in the freezer.

Now that I have you ready to dive into the recipe, I’m not going to post it here because I don’t have permission and its a brand new book. It just didn’t feel right. If I know you and you really want it to make these, I’ll let you borrow my book. That’s pretty fair. Heidi has tons of free recipes on 101 Cookbooks and most of them are not repeats from either book.