Hey, y’all. 🙂

I’m just gonna jump right in today. When we last met I was waiting to see a Dr. about my ultrasound results. I’m going to have to have some vein surgery on my clot leg. I don’t have a date for it yet…waiting on insurance to approve it. I’m kind of scared but it’ll be considered out patient even though sedation is involved.

I decided to give Instagram a try.  JATGAHB

I don’t know though. I don’t know how I feel about it. I thought because my blog posting has slowed down since it’s taking awhile to get enough to post about that maybe just doing an Instagram pic every day or few days might be better.  Can’t say I love it though. I’m probably more of a sit down and pour it all out into one long post kind of girl.  We’ll see though.

I just truly cannot believe how proud some people are of being willfully and purposely unintelligent.

Went out today for a little retail therapy. 🙂  Wings and a caeser at the outlet mall.

Used this recipe to make some sugar free caramel. Mine is a little lighter in color than hers because I didn’t use as much molasses or coconut sugar as she did. It still turned out super delish. 🙂

I don’t know if it’s because I’m worried about my vein stuff or what but I’ve really been struggling with the whole keto thing for about the last 10 days or so. I haven’t fallen face first into a vat of chocolate…yet…but for the first time since I started back in September it feels hard.  Until now it really was easy.  I had a will of steel but right now that’s just not happening.

To help stay on track I made some sugar free chocolate and caramel. I’d actually experimented with SF chocolate several times before but they all ended in kitchen disaster. This was perfect. I used the ratios from the candy bar recipe in this book.  The book is paleo though and I needed mine to be more keto so I used:

65g cup cocoa butter

14g cocoa powder

20g erythritol / splenda blend

1 tbsp dry milk

big pinch of vanilla powder

1/2 tsp sunflower lecithin

I melted the cocoa butter in the microwave on 1/2 power til melted

While it was melting I put all the dry ingredients in the Vita mix and powdered them.

Then whisked dry into butter.

Poured into molds.

The taste was great but it was a little too liquid-y. It set up fine but you can see in the molding pic how thin it was.  The original recipe calls for 2 tbsp coconut butter.  I didn’t have any because I really can’t stand the taste of it but I think it’s probably needed for thickness so next time I’ll add it and see.

Overall I was very happy with it and it was perfect for me.  I like some of the commercial sugar free chocolates I’ve tried but they all have at least one ingredient that doesn’t agree with my digestive system.

Erythritol does nothing bad or gross to me so it’s perfect for this chocolate.

It does need to be powdered though to keep it from recrystallizing as it cools.

Also, if you decide to do filled candies like I tried to do with the caramel…let the first bit of chocolate you put in the mold firm up before you add the caramel. If you don’t the caramel will sink down to the bottom and you will end up with ugly looking candies like the pic above. They taste great. They’re just not pretty to look at.

🙂

On that note 😉 I’ll leave you for today.  Have a great week and I’ll see you soon. 🙂