When SweetLeaf asked me to work up a recipe using their stevia, I was excited because they have so many different flavors that I haven’t had a chance to play with. And, so many of you have asked me for more recipes using stevia exclusively. This forced me into the kitchen to recreate traditional textures and flavors without honey, coconut palm sugar, dates, or another unrefined sugar.
Let’s talk about the tart. The texture is smooth and fudgy. It melts in your mouth. Combined with the crunch of the pecans and the flakiness of the crust, I find it to be darn close to perfect.
The sweetness level is just right. There isn’t any stevia aftertaste in this tart. The trick to that is twofold – use just enough stevia to achieve the sweetness level you want and add some other ingredients to amp up the flavor. I used extra vanilla extract, espresso powder, and mesquite flour to add depth to the tart’s flavor and mask any lingering notes of stevia.
You should also note that when baking exclusively with stevia, you will have a more dense product because you can’t add air by creaming the fat and sugar. And, you need to use something to replace the body and moisture that sugar would provide. In this case, I found that unsweetened applesauce works perfectly.
Many of you will probably wonder if you really need to use two different Sweet Drops liquid stevia flavors. You could make this tart with just Chocolate or Vanilla Sweet Drops, but I found that the combination of the two produced the best flavor.
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Read the rest of Chocolate Fudge Pecan Tart for SweetLeaf Stevia
© Amy Green for Simply Sugar & Gluten-Free, 2013. |
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