Black Fodder Coffee’s double chocolate cake a healthy indulgence 

The words “double chocolate cake” were all diner Lynda Jo Shlaes needed to know. She had already come to appreciate Black Fodder Coffee’s attention to detail in their custom coffees at 349 Ashland Ave. in River Forest, but the cake confirmed her as a regular eater too. She admitted that she orders it at least twice a month. 

“The double chocolate cake is like a chocolate cloud,” Shlaes said. “It is fantastic. And it’s healthy. And it’s sugar-free, gluten-free and made with dark chocolate, which is my thing.”  

The cake’s sponge base is made from a mix of gluten-free flours. The middle is a pillowy mousse, topped with chocolate ganache made with milk and butter from grass-fed cows. 

When Black Fodder’s owners, couple Monika and Maciej Wolfart, opened the coffee shop last year, their first goal was to bring a level of care and sophistication to the cup. The next step was to share what they’d learned from more than a decade of eating low-carb and gluten-free.  

“That second leg was healthy eating,” Monika Wolfart said, with her husband Maciej translating for her from Polish. “Something that would go beyond just typical coffee shop baked goods.” 

According to the Wolfarts, often when baked items are touted as “keto” they can be even worse due to the chemicals that are loaded into them to get the low-carb or gluten-free label. Rice flour for example, they said, can contain arsenic.  

“We use natural sweeteners,” Monika Wolfart said. “But the fact that something is natural doesn’t mean it’s automatically good for us. We started with erythritol and monk fruit, but we really try to follow where the research is really leading us. It’s showing that those two are not without issues. Double-blind randomized tests show that allulose is much better. It’s actually really good for our biome. It’s probiotic.” 

These ingredients cost more. For example, the eggs they use are not only organic and free-range, but also pasture raised, which is a higher standard of living for the chickens.  

“We’re paying much more for ingredients,” Monika Wolfart said. “Maybe people will not really notice right away. We believe that there are people who are looking deeper than just the surface level of, ‘Oh, that’s low carb, or that’s keto, or that’s healthy.’ We wanted really to give them the ingredients that we believe are truly healthy.” 

Maciej Wolfart said, “Our philosophy: let’s do our best to serve people. What would we, being kind of little freaks about healthy eating, eat ourselves? Let’s really see if our guests, our customers, will appreciate that.” 

Apparently, Lynda Jo Shlaes did.  

“It isn’t that I have a gluten problem or even a sugar problem,” she said. “It’s just that I try to eat as healthy as I can. And their cake an indulgence that still feels healthy.”