Pumpkin Roll with Coffee Cream

Light and airy, this low carb pumpkin cake roll is a delicious fall dessert. With only 3g net carbs per serving, it’s a perfect grain-free, keto treat!

   There’s a growing consciousness about where our food comes from, and how it’s grown and raised and brought to market, and I find myself thinking more and more about these things all the time. This consciousness took a while to dawn on me, which is strange considering I spent the first seven years of my life on a small farm in Ontario. We raised beef cattle, so I never fell into that trap of thinking that our food, our meat and eggs and produce, sprang fully formed from grocery store shelves. But as a society, we have distanced ourselves for many years from our food production and it can be hard to remember where our food actually comes from. Now there seems to be a profound shift in this thinking, and it is without question a shift for the better. Supporting small scale, humane farming practices benefits not only the farmers, but also the animals and the environment. I now try to be as mindful as possible when I shop for food, be it at the grocery store or the farmer’s market. I check out my labelling a lot more carefully, looking for the brands that support small farmers and healthier, more ethical farming practices such as cage-free and grassfed. I have often purchased Nellie’s Cage-Free Eggs, as well as their organic sister brand, Pete & Gerry’s, because they fit both these bills. You can read more about the Nellie’s story here (there really was a Nellie, and she was a hen!), but they were the first certified humane egg farm in the country. As someone who follows a low carb diet and loves to bake, I go through a lot of eggs. And by a lot of eggs, I really mean a LOT of eggs. Low carb, gluten-free baking typically takes more eggs than conventional recipes do, often two or three times as many. I also have a family of five to feed and we often eat eggs for breakfast. Or dinner. Scrambled, fried, or cooked up in a frittata, they make an easy, healthy meal. We probably go through an average of 3 dozen eggs a week. Given our high egg consumption, I like knowing that I am making choices that are healthier, more ethical and that support small farmers. I also love that their eggs are packed in recycled material. “This package used to be a plastic bottle”. This low carb, gluten-free pumpkin roll has been on my to-make list for a while and of course, it takes a number of eggs. I modelled the cake part after conventional pumpkin roll recipes, which have you whip the egg whites and fold them into a batter that doesn’t contain a lot of flour (or almond flour, in my case). This makes it lighter and airier, and a lot less cake-y. It also makes it a bit tricky to work with and prone to cracking, especially in the absence of gluten. I also did away with the heavy cream cheese filling and opted for a lightly sweetened whipped cream with a little coffee flavour. But OH MY, it was divine. It was so light and airy that it was rather like biting into a pumpkin-flavoured cloud. Or maybe a pumpkin latte flavoured cloud.