The Only Kind of Mess I Like....

Okay, technically it's not baking but this is an incredible dessert and very low in calories. I admit I definitely don't eat as much fruit as I should so making sure it's paired with yogurt and meringue is always a plus in my book. Just breaking up a couple of meringues, a half a punnet of raspberries (probably my favourite fruit unless you count Froot Loops) and two tablespoons of Total 0% makes a filling dessert. And it really satisfies a sweet tooth. The baker in me screams to make my own meringues, but the lazy wench says 'just go to Marks and Spencer and buy the bloody things'.

Weight Watchers ProPoints: 3
Calories: 180

Not Nutella Cupcakes

Was following a recipe from my Hummingbird book for Nutella cupcakes - was half way through before I realised it wasn't hazlenut chocolate spread at all...just chocolate. Ah well.

The base didn't have Not Nutella but has cocoa powder in it. Has anyone seen any low fat cocoa powder? I do prefer to stick with Bournville but might try some Skinny Cow or Weight Watchers drinking chocolate next time, with a touch of coffee to really bring out the chocolate flavour. I was a bit worried that the mixture looked really runny - hoped it wasn't the margarine throwing off the chemical balance...

But after their alloted twenty minutes they looked pretty good!

I then cored the middles out and filled it with Not Nutella and topped them with chocolate frosting.

I was experimenting with 'I Can't Believe it's Not Butter' in both the cake and the frosting. In the cake it seemed to work fine but the intial batch of frosting I did just became a horrible goopy mess. It was like gross runny custard. And when you tasted it, you certainly could tell it wasn't butter (in fact you could certainly tell it was full of chemicals - yuk!!). So with the second try I went with Stork instead of butter (mainly because I didn't have any in the fridge) and it worked much better. Had to add a little more icing sugar to get it just right but they've come out beautifully. And you save nearly 100 calories per cake because there's no butter in the cupcake base. Total calorie bargin :-)

Weight Watchers ProPoints: 10
Calories: 292

My Mum's Favourite Cupcakes

I'd always been wary of recipes for filled cupcakes until I found my genius cupcake corer. I'd been whining to my boyfriend that morning that I didn't trust myself to core a cupcake with a knife. I didn't see how you could do it in a clean way without ruining the rest of the cake itself. So I was pretty amazed when that exact same day we were wandering a food specialty store in North Berwick and we just happened across the above set. Needless to say I got home and got baking!

They really make a difference to how versitile I can be with my baking now. In fact they've resulted in my mum's favourite cupcake flavour - lemon curd. I made a vanilla sponge, cored it with the corer, filled it with lemon curd and topped it with a light lemon frosting.

My next project using the corer is going to be the Strawberry Trifle cupcake from the new Hummingbird Bakery's Cake Days book. I'm going to change it slightly to put the strawberries through the cake as well as filled in the middle. I'm sure they'll become my mum's second favourite. I'll just have to wait until she's finished the batch of lemon curd's she's keeping in her freezer....

Low Fat Banana Muffins

I was tempted to make another batch of brownies today because I found a great recipe but then thought 'anyone who reads this is going to think I have a bit of an obsession with chocolate if I don't put something else in a while'. So I thought about what I had in the house and the two close-to-death bananas came to mind. 

Rather than having a recipe in mind for this one, I went online and found a low fat banana loaf recipe. Since I wasn't keen on slicing it into bits (I always find I give myself far too generous a slice...) I made them into little muffins. 

Ingredients:

2 large bananas

1 teaspoon baking soda

120 ml Total 0% Yogurt (which I LOVE)

60 ml sunflower oil

175 grams brown sugar

1 large egg

1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

130 grams plain flour

60 grams wholemeal flour

1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1 teaspoon baking powder

Some honey (optional)

• Pop the oven onto 180 degrees. 
• Begin by mashing the bananas and mixing them with the yogurt. Add the baking soda and leave to do it's magic while you prepare the other items. 
• Mix the oil, sugar, egg and vanilla extract in another bowl. It will turn a gorgeous brown colour and become an oily mass when you can mix around quite soothingly. (Or maybe that's just me...)
• Seive together your flours, the cinnamon and baking powder in another bowl (I apologise in advance for all the washing up you'll have to do afterwards) and create a well in the middle
• Mix the yogurt gloop and the soothing oily gloop together and add slowly to the dry flour mixture. 
• It will look horrid - trust me. Bit of banana creating little pockets of white, but trust me it's fine if it looks like this. 
• Distribute the mixture evenly between 12 muffin cases in a muffin tray. Make sure the one you intend to have is slightly larger than the others. 
• Pop into the oven and let cook away for about 20 minutes. After that, bring them out, poke em with a cocktail stick to make sure they're cooked all the way through and voila!

I drizzled on some honey as soon as I took them out the oven so they were still soft enough for it to seep all the way through the muffin. Definitely a good option I'd say. Another option would be to try the Total Yogurt with honey in it - might add a nice little kick to the recipe.

Oh and don't do the washing up now. Have one while they're still warm with a nice cup of tea then guilt your partner into doing the dishes later. Sorted.

Weight Watchers ProPoints: 5

Calories: 175

Vegan Chocolate Fudge Cupcakes

Tonight I tried a recipe from another book I bought this week called Cupcake Heaven. There's a section in there for healthy cupcakes. I didn't trust it to be healthy at first because it was surrounded by recipes for Caramalised Banana Split Cupcakes and Fudge Frosted Peanut Butter Cupcakes. Luckily.....I was proved very wrong and they've turned out delicious!

As they're vegan, they didn't include eggs, butter or milk - another thing that made me suspicious (I should say at this point I'm naturally cynical when it comes to things being called 'healthy', hence the blog...). I admit I didn't choose them because they were vegan, instead I just went through the book, looking at the Weight Watchers points and picking the recipes that actually looked tasty. Some plain flour, baking soda, cocoa powder, sugar, water, vegetable oil and white wine vinegar all bound together to make yummy cupcakes.

Possibly my favourite thing about the book though is that there are no airs and graces. None of this 'mix in a freestanding mixer with a paddle attachment' which any baker recognises as 'mix in a £350+ mixer'. I do have an old Kenwood Chef but am just as happy to mix things in a bowl, old fashioned like, so just did that in this case (was one less thing to wash too. ;)).

The mixture looked fab. Runny and the complete opposite to yesterdays 'lumps'! When baked they were a glorious dark brown colour and I just knew they were going to taste beautiful. I let them cool and made the frosting a few hours later. It was made by mixing vegetable oil, cocoa powder, boiling water and icing sugar which created a shiny and spreadable glossy frosting which spread really easily over the cupcakes. I'd be keen to make the same frosting for any chocolate cupcakes I make in the future - it would also go well on top of brownie.

Needless to say, they're delicious. I was a bit wary of continuing yesterday after neither recipe went flawlessly but these definitely smashed one out of the park.

Weight Watchers ProPoints: 6

Calories: 177

Healthy Marmalade Muffins

My second attempt at a fat free baking evening were some marmalade muffins made with wholemeal flour and yogurt instead of butter. I had some concerns about the recipe - mainly because I had accidently picked up wholemeal flour instead of wholewheat, and the recipe didn't have any sugar in it. Since marmalade isn't known for it's sweet taste I was worried they would just end up bitter and unpleasant. It turned out this wasn't miles away from the truth...

The mixing instructions just suggested mixing it together until the dry ingredients are moistened....ew? In the end I had something that looked suspiciously like brown goo and I thought 'this isn't going to look great'. I plopped them into the muffin cases and waited for them to spread out like the cupcake mixture I was used to. Nope. It just sort of sat in the middle of the case...

Sadly when I took them out the oven 15 minutes later they looked exactly the same, just a little browner. Quite bitter and they didn't rise and shape so looked more like rock cakes.

They tasted fine but you definitely noticed the lack of sugar in these ones.  As I made tea I shouted through to boyfriend to find out how they tasted and he described it (reluctantly) as a 'healthy tasting treat'. Hmmm....Unconvinced with these but I'm not giving up. I suppose I was sort of hoping they'd turn out like little cupcakes that I could build upon but they're just too....stodgy. Nice, but not quite what I was after.

Weight Watchers ProPoints: 4
Calories: 137

Healthy Fudgy Chocolate Brownies

The 'Secrets to Fat-Free Baking' book is split into sections about what to substitute for a 'fattening' ingredient. This particular brownie recipe features in the 'prune butter instead of real butter' section. Initially I'm thinking that prune butter sounds gross. Well, actually, my first thought was 'what's prune butter, is this another weird American thing I've never heard of?' (The book is American, my first hurdle was working out the cups in grams but I was worried the second would be strange ingredients...) It turns out the minor panic was for nothing - prune butter is just blended prunes with a touch of water. Sure it still sounded pretty gross, but at least I knew I could make it!!

A lot of the other ingredients for the brownies were fairly normal: egg whites, sugar, cocoa powder etc. So they weren't a problem. It was my first time cooking with oat bran so I was interested to see how they would pan out. Brought everything together and the mixture looked fab - really chocolatey and lovely. My concern though was that there was no raising agent whatsoever in the recipe. I know brownies are meant to be dense so I wasn't too worried....but maybe I should have been! The brownies came out the oven extremely pancake like - delicious but slim. If I were making it again I'd definitely include some self raising flour just to give them a little lift!

Weight Watchers ProPoints: 2
Calories: 76

New Beginnings

I want to start a blog of my baking. I'm hoping to make it a mixture of attempts at low fat baking and regular, pretty fat filled cupcakes. Obviously the two may not go hand in hand but I know that while the aim should always be to make things as healthy as possible, sometimes a sugar soaked snack isn't going to go amiss. So hopefully the blog will feature a bit of both and ocassionally a combination of the two: a pretty and healthy cupcake. That's the goal anyway. If I can make a healthy cupcake that looks and tastes like one with sugar and butter, I'll be a hero of the baking world.So going forward on the blog, healthy recipes will be green and regular ones will be blue. Not that you'll need to be indicated I think - the butter and sugar levels will probably tip you off. ;)

The reason for the healthy baking is that I started Weight Watchers back in September because I stepped on the scales one day and discovered I was the heaviest I've ever been. I've been with my boyfriend for about 18 months and the only downside of the fact he's a fantastic cook is that my weight has slowly crept from 'very overweight' to 'frightening'. I'm getting to an age where if I didn't do something soon it was going to have real long term effects on my body - so I opted for a weight loss technique that wouldn't be completely crippled by my love of baking. Since September I've lost over 4 stone (56lbs) and am starting to feel really great. In the last month or so I've gone from just cutting back the fattening stuff, to choosing healthy options because they're actually better for me.

Regular baking just isn't healthy or good for you on a regular basis, no matter how you swing it. Its full of sugar, fat and white flour - all the really bad things in their purest form. None of those things are good on their own so when you combine them you get incredible taste but it's not so good for the fat intake. So the big aim is to create really delicious baked goods that are low in fat and with easy to buy ingredients. If I have to go into a health food shop to buy half the stuff, it's a nono. Its one of my real pet hates with lots of famous chefs; not all of us have the money or inclination to faff about in 5 shops getting the ingredients for one recipe. I bought a book earlier this week called Secrets of Fat Free Baking. At first I glanced through it and seemed to have broken the rule about easy access ingredients. I'm looking at stuff like prune butter, non fat buttermilk and oat bran. None of them things I've seen while browsing around Tesco... But upon closer inspection (and an actual visit to Tesco) it was clear they were all easy to make or easy to find.. 

With regard to the regular and pretty cupcakes, it's what I've been doing for the last year or so. I love experimenting with new flavours and decorations and have even had a couple of examples of selling batches to friends. My favourite books are the Hummingbird Bakery book and their new Cake Days book. They're a complete juxtaposition to the healthy eating aim though since the frosting alone is generally about 400 calories....per cupcake! Eeek. Definitely just a one off treat. 

Thank you for reading the rambling. I promise not to do it often.