Could be that there is no point to even try, but I crave baked goods! Ok the story is that I am on a much needed and long overdue diet. I’ll be here awhile. I currently see results only if I keep to about 1300 cal per day, given the time I can devote to exercise. As I log foods, the obvious calorie busters are flours, fats, and sugars. Is there any baked good worth making that could minimize or eliminate some of those and still be edible? I have a couple of cups of unsweetened apple sauce in the fridge rn. I have normal recipe muffins in my freezer and each of those little baby things is 150ish cal. Looking to improve on that. Or you can laugh me out of the room. Thanks!
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Have you looked into a monkfruit sweetener?? Neighbor #2 can’t have sugar, so I made her a cake with monkfruit sweetener. Its not bad, of course sugar is better, but you might want to look into it.
I also save the juice from a can of sweet potatoes, shred some apple and add just a little brown sugar to my simple sweet bread recipe & make a bread-cake loaf. I imagine you can tweak the ingredients (and calories) with a different sweetener.
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Thank you for the suggestion of monk fruit. I’m not familiar but will check it out.
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Maybe you’re going to laugh me out of the room, but maybe instead of eating one whole muffin at 150 cal, why not just eat half of it?
Instead of subbing out ingredients, or swapping in substitutes, just eat less of the real deal.
Just an idea.
Good luck on your diet.
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Yes they even make an Organic Version, if you need it to be organic. Of course, the organic version is more expensive.
Again, I purchased this for a cake (for my neighbor) and she asked if it could be organic.
That is a hundred percent a strategy which I already use. But if you saw what 150 cal looks like in a muffin. Well, here…this one has some nuts and so is particularly tiny. The non nut muffins I have frozen go to the top of the paper cup.
Logging cals in recipes by weighing the ingredients is pretty eye opening.
Thinking out loud here… How do your feel about making a rice pudding with monkfruit or another artificial sweetener??
The calorie count should be under 100 for 1/2 cup…
Yeah, actually I love fruit which is even fewer cals than rice etc. but I’m trying to see how baking specifically can be modified.
It’s been a long time since I knew someone who was calorie counting rather than ingredient swapping, but yogurt and fruit / veg puree instead of butter / oil and sugar are the ones I recall.
You might try looking for old Weight Watchers recipes.
Most recent baking swaps I recall were nut flours instead of wheat, dates instead of sugar, and so on, which shift macros and insulin spike and things like that but won’t help with a straight calorie count.
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Yes. Sometimes buttermilk for cream as well. I guess I was hoping someone already had some tried and true recipes that weren’t awful!
My wife’s go to is this magazine. She typically asks me to halve the recipe or freezes half. She portions by visual cues a la WW.
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Thanks! What do you think of the recipes?
The last one I baked was the brownie recipe. My wife enjoyed them. But mostly the magazine is really helpful as a reference for ingred subs that turn out well.
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My fav low cal treat this time of year is baked apples. Baked pears, another.
But I tend to portion control everything except celebrations.
Continued success!
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Just a heads-up: monkfruit can have a very bitter aftertaste to some people.
I’ve tried it in baked goods and while it is sweet up front, the bitterness afterwards coated my mouth and was really quite awful. I have the same issue with stevia.
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I can’t stand the taste of Stevia or monkfruit - just awful. Granulated erythrytol, sucralose (Splenda) or allulose taste much more like real sugar, if you’re open to using sugar alcohols.
I saw that in the write ups about it, but I’ve never had it. So nothing to lose in trying.
I’m not closed to anything except a lot of chemicals. I had my nutrasweet days, but I’m over it. If I’m losing weight for health, I want to be consistent and not put crap in my body. Are the items you mentioned natural ingredients? Sorry very little experience with them.
Funny in the. Brownie recipe step 4 has you cut the brownies into 5 rows and 4 columns. 20 right? Top of recipe says makes 64. Wonder if the calorie count triples then each time you eat one…
