A tender low carb lemon poke cake baked in your slow cooker. This is the perfect sugar-free, grain-free dessert to welcome Spring!
So here we are, another instalment of the low carb slow cooker cake series. It’s been four months since my last slow cooker cake and it was high time to create another one. Now, I will be honest that this particular flavour would never have occurred to me if not for a suggestion by a reader. Lemon cake certainly occurred to me, but not lemon poke cake. In fact, poke cake was an altogether foreign concept for me until a few short years ago. I’d never heard of them and then suddenly they were everywhere. Every. Where. Well, everywhere on Pinterest, anyway. As with anything in Food Blogger Land, they seemingly came out of nowhere and overnight everyone and their dog was making them, photographing them and posting about them.
Still, I never really thought about making one until a reader emailed with her request. And not only was it for lemon poke cake, but more specifically for slow cooker lemon poke cake. Which presented its own set of challenges, I have to say. If you’ve never heard of poke cake, it is as the name suggests: you poke holes into your cake and then pour something gooey and delicious over it so it sinks down into the holes. Normally, such cakes are simply spread in a pan and baked in the oven, then poked and prodded and filled and frosted. And often it’s served right from the pan after that. But a deep slow cooker makes that a little more complicated and I didn’t want this to come out in messy pieces with the frosting smeared all over. So the ever useful parchment paper to the rescue for lifting the cooled, poked and filled cake out of the slow cooker, to be frosted on a serving platter.
My second challenge was deciding what to pour over the cake to fill the holes. Some research on lemon poke cake yielded two possibilities: lemon jello and lemon curd. As much as I love lemon curd, it’s a far sight more time consuming to make, so I opted for lemon jello. But of course, I wasn’t about to go buy the commercial sugar-free lemon jello, all chemical-laden as it is. No, no, no, that would simply not do. Making your own healthy Jello is easy enough, thankfully. And to make it stand out a little more in the cake, I added a few drops of yellow natural food colouring. Then a simple whipped cream frosting and there we had it: low carb slow cooker lemon poke cake.
There’s no reason you couldn’t do this in the oven too, although you might lose a little of that amazing tenderness that comes from baking in your slow cooker. I’d recommend a 9×13 well-greased pan at 325F. I am not sure how long it would take to cook, but start with 25 minutes and check on it every 5 minutes after that.
Slow Cooker Lemon Poke Cake
Ingredients
Cake:
- 3 cups almond flour
- 3/4 cup Swerve Sweetener
- 1/4 cup unflavored whey protein powder
- 2 tsp baking powder
- 1/4 tsp salt
- 4 large eggs room temperature
- 1/2 cup unsweetened almond or cashew milk
- 1/2 cup butter melted
- Zest of one lemon
- 2 tbsp lemon juice
- 1 tsp lemon extract
- 1/4 tsp liquid stevia extract
Sugar-Free Lemon Jello:
- 1/4 cup fresh lemon juice
- 1 tbsp grassfed gelatin (Great Lakes orange can)
- 1 cup boiling water
- 3 tbsp powdered Swerve Sweetener
- 3 drops yellow vegetable-based food colouring (optional but helps boost yellow colour)
Frosting:
- 1 cup whipping cream
- 1/4 cup powdered Swerve Sweetener
- 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
Instructions
Cake:
- Line a 6 quart slow cooker with parchment paper with enough parchment coming up the sides for easy removal. Grease parchment paper (I like to use Kelapo Coconut Oil spray).
- In a large bowl, whisk together the almond flour, sweetener, protein powder, baking powder, and salt. Beat in eggs, nut milk, butter, lemon zest, lemon juice, lemon extract, and stevia extract until well combined.
- Pour batter into prepared slow cooker and cook on low for 2 1/2 to 3 hours. Let cool completely in the slow cooker, then take a skewer and poke all over about 1/2 an inch apart, twisting skewer to make holes.
Jello (make this while the cake is cooling):
- Combine lemon juice and grassfed gelatin in a bowl and let sit until thickened. Add boiling water, sweetener and yellow food colouring, if using and stir until sweetener and gelatin are completely dissolved. Let cool until beginning to thicken.
- Pour all over the top of the cake, letting jello sink down into the holes of the cake. Lift the ceramic insert out of the slow cooker and refrigerate 2 to 3 hours, to set.
- Using the edges of the parchment, lift the cake out gently and place on a serving platter (if you want to remove it from the parchment, place it on a flat surface and gently work a sharp knife underneath it, then use two large spatulas or flippers to move it to your serving platter).
Frosting:
- Beat whipping cream with sweetener and vanilla until stiff peaks form. Spread all over top and sides of cake.
Notes
Saturated fatty acids: 10.95g
Total fat: 29.65g
Calories from fat: 266
Cholesterol: 109mg
Carbohydrate 7.64g
Total dietary fiber: 3.17g
Protein: 9.16g
Sodium: 247mg Please note that I am not a medical or nutritional professional. I provide nutritional information for my recipes simply as a courtesy to my readers. It is calculated using MacGourmet software and I remove erythritol from the final carb count and net carb count, as it does not affect my own blood glucose levels. I do my best to be as accurate as possible but you should independently calculate nutritional information on your own before relying on them.
Nutrition
