Can I substitute powdered walnuts for all-purpose flour in a cake?
I saw a recipe where ground-up walnuts were a substitute for flour but this was for a cake that you do not cook (it was a recipe for chocolate cake made out of zucchini.
Can powdered walnuts (grounded by a food processor) ever be used as a substitute for flour in more normal cakes, particularly ones that contain flour and are baked?
Here is the recipe cookingalamel.com/2013/03/raw-chocolate-cheesecake.html
(2)2 Comments
Sorted by latest first Latest Oldest Best
A direct substitution would not work. The cake needs gluten to rise properly. You could replace up to 1/4 the weight of the wheat flour with proper nut flour, though without much fuss.
You can't make nut flour by grinding nuts in a blender/food processor. Nut flour is made from the solid material left over after the oil has been pressed from the nuts. You'll wind up with ground nuts or nut butter, neither of which will work well in a cake.
Sort of. Nut flours are the base of many "flourless" cakes and torts. This one from Joy of Baking is typical, and uses almond flour, which is more common than walnut. Here's one that specifically uses walnut. Note that these are not examples of using nut flours as a substitution for flour, they are recipes developed for nut flours. Both of those recipes start with whole nuts that are ground in a food processor or spice grinder.
Wheat flour behaves very differently, if you want to bake a cake using nut flour in combination with or instead of wheat flour, search for recipes that call for nut flour. Trying to work out an actual substitution would be fraught with peril. Nuts are full of fat and non-gluten protein, wheat flour has starch and gluten forming protein (although a high gluten level is not usually desirable in cakes, that's why cake flour is lower in protein than AP, so that it creates less gluten).
Now I see from the edit to the question that the zucchini/chocolate cake that led to the qustion is actually a kind of cheesecake. Cheesecakes generally don't contain flour, in the case of your recipe the nuts are actually replacing a portion of the cream cheese. In other cheesecakes you might see nuts in the crust or garnish, but I've never seen flour in the filling.
Terms of Use Privacy policy Contact About Cancellation policy © freshhoot.com2025 All Rights reserved.