A good place to check would be your local library, or even to buy online. A cook book that might be good to search for at your library would be 'Gluten-free, Sugar-free Cooking: Over 200 Delicious Recipes to Help You Live a Healthier, Allergy-Free Life' by Susan O'Brien.
One of the best websites that I have found for specific recipes is Allrecipes.com. Once there you would go to sugar free recipes/diabetic recipes. Walgreens offers a free diabetic recipe book at their pharmacy.
I would look at this website http://www.typefreediabetes.com/Diabetic-Recipes-s/5733.htm if you are looking for healty low in sugar dessert recipes for you family.
I would look for books that have diabetic type recipes for most of those would be healtly and sugarfree, and would deffinaely work for for the elderly in your retirement home.
Chicken salad, and Asian soup with chicken are two really good recipes that are for people that are diabetic. If you would like to look for more recipes, you can go here: http://www.diabeticlifestyle.com/recipes/chicken. They have a ton of diabetic recipes with chicken in it.
A good recipe for a diabetic safe carrot cake would be one that uses artificial or natural sweeteners as opposed to sugar. artificial sweeteners tend not to raise blood pressure as much as sugar does.
If you are looking for recipes on how to eat healthy living as a diabetic you would be most benefited to obtain a cookbook that is a specialty for diabetic for good cookbook would be the Betty Crocker's CookBook:Everyday Meals, which can be found on amazon.com
A diabetic is generally concerned with balancing sugar levels in their bloodstream. Therefore, a good diabetic food gift would generally be something that has either a low sugar count or a sugar substitute.
The top diabetic cake recipe would be a maater of opinion and probably different for each person due to their tastes. I have only tasted a few but the Spring Fling layerd white cake was my favorite. It is made with Splenda and has a filling consisting of reduced sugar apricot preserves and strawberries.
Most deserts are not sugar free but many recipes for desserts can be prepared sugar free, buy substituting sugar for other sweeteners, otherwise just sugar free store bought ice cream or cookies would work :)
If you are looking for good, delicious diabetic recipes by the way of using the internet and looking up the recipes on the following websites. These websites include "foodDotcom", "DiabeticLivingOnline" or "AllRecipes" which all offer healthy, alternative recipes.
Both allrecipes.com and diabeticlifestyle.com have a wide selection of recipes for every meal of the day. They also cover different types of food, like Mexican and Italian, to help keep things interesting.
Most food is fairly safe for a diabetic as long as they avoid processed sugars and starches. For some specific recipes that would be great for your family, try visiting this website: www.diabeticlifestyle.com/recipes.