Peanut Butter Chocolate Cookies

I have had a craving for peanut butter cookies for a long time. I haven't had peanut butter since I started losing weight 10 months ago. I love peanut butter but it has so many calories and while it is good fat it is still fat. Trust me, I get enough fat in my diet without peanut butter.

Earlier today I made little raspberry cookies for miles that had only 20 calories a cookie. I figured I could tinker this recipe a little to make it peanut butter chocolate instead of raspberry chocolate. It took a lot more tinkering than I imagined and this cookies have 10 more calories a cookie than the raspberry but when we are talking about 30 calories total that is a lot more. In the end they were totally worth it as they met my craving and now I can move on...maybe.

Ingredients:

• 2 tbsp cocoa powder
• 1/8 tsp salt
• 1 tbsp brown sugar
  
• 3 tbsp Splenda
• 6 tbsp flour
• 1/4 tsp baking soda
• 1.5 tbsp light butter melted
  
• 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
• 3 tbsp peanut butter
• 2-3 tbsp water
  

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees
2. Sift dry ingredients together. Add wet ingredients and mix adding more water if needed to get a crumbly but manageable dough. Dough will be very dry.
3. Smash into small flat disks. Bake for 7-8 minutes.
   

Makes 18 cookies - calories per cookie - 32

Raspberry Chocolate Cookies

These little gems are adapted from 17 and baking - my new favorite teenage blogger. This girl is amazing. Not only is she from Seattle, my long last city, but she is in school, a teenager, and has a beautiful blog. She is very talented.

At only 20 calories a cookie these might be my new favorite cookie to make. Of course they had to give me some problems at first but I think I worked out the kinks. You should know that cooking with apple sauce and splenda as substitutes will result in much drier cookies. Next time I will use 1 tbsp light butter in place of some of the apple sauce to make these even better.

Ingredients:

• 2 tbsp raspberry jelly
• 1/4 cup Splenda
• 1.5 tbsp apple sauce (next time I will use 1 tbsp butter and possibly make up the difference with a little extra jelly)
  
• 1/4 tsp vanilla extract
• 1/4 tsp almond extract
• 2 tbsp cocoa powder
• 6 tbsp flour
• 1/4 tsp baking soda
• 1/8 tsp salt
• 1 tsp sugar for dusting

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees
2. Sift together flour, cocoa powder, Splenda, salt, and baking soda. Add jelly, apple sauce, and both extracts.
3. Mix until combined and move into the freezer to cool for 10 minutes. This step was not in the original recipe but it made the dough much more manageable.
4. Remove from freezer and roll into tiny, slightly larger than a marble, sized balls. Sprinkle with sugar. Sugar the bottom of a glass and flatten the cookies.
5. Bake for 8 minutes.

Makes 18 cookies - calories per cookie - 20

Happy Fake Patty's Day

In honor of Hoboken Fake Patty's Day I decided to make Irish Car Bomb Cupcakes. Hoboken celebrates St. Patrick's Day the Saturday before the actual St. Patrick's day the rest of the world celebrates. This day is CRAZY as people come from all over the city to wait in lines that start forming at 7am outside the many Irish bars that line Washington Street. As I live right on the main drive I get to sit back on my fire escape and watch not only the drunken stumbling of thousands of 20 somethings, but the parade as well. It proves to be quite entertaining.
But back to the cupcakes. I scoped out this recipe from Smitten Kitchen weeks ago and I have just been waiting, none too patiently, for this day to roll around. While I haven't actually eaten one of these in its complete form I can honestly tell you that all of the components are fantastic. This is Irish love at first taste.

Please follow the link for the recipe and instructions.
Edited to Add: Now that I have actually eaten one of these I can say...yummy. The chocolate cake isn't too sweet and the icing is strongly flavored of Bailey's (I did add a little extra). They compliment each other nicely. There is only a hint of Jameson in the filling.

I followed the instructions on the website and made a double serving of the filling as suggested but in the end I didn't use all of it. I probably only used half. I think I didn't cut out as much of the cake as other people did. This was fine with me.

My recipe made 20 mini cupcakes and 9 large cupcakes. This recipe would have made about 18 large cupcakes for me as my cupcake pans are larger than average. I am estimating the calories in these as I didn't use all the filling, or the icing, and I made large and small cupcakes...but I *think* there are about 425 calories in each of the large cupcakes.

Chocolate Banana Smoothie

While watching 5 Ingredient Fix two weekends ago I saw Claire Robinson make a super indulgent mudslide milkshake. With over 750 calories per serving Claire's milkshake, while I am sure it is amazing, is not exactly something I am willing to eat on a Wednesday evening. However, I have been thinking about this milkshake for a week and a half. I wanted one. Bad. So I made my own. No alcohol, no ice cream, and three times as much banana make my version healthier but still very good if I do say so myself. So good that there almost were pictures of this concoction.

Ingredients:

• 1 1/2 bananas chopped and frozen
• 1/4 cup non-fat milk
• 6 oz fat free vanilla yogurt (I used Dannon light and fit)
• 1 tbsp cocoa powder - unsweetened

Directions:

1. Blend everything together adding extra milk if you like your milkshakes to be easier to drink. I prefer mine to almost need a spoon to consume.

Makes one 10-12 oz serving: Calories 250

Coconut Macaroons

Miles introduced me to coconut macaroons about 10 months ago. We bought a container of macaroons from Trader Joes and made the mistake of opening the container while in the car on the way home. I had eaten five before I looked at the nutrition information on the top of the container. I don't remember exactly how many calories each coconut macaroon ended up being but I remember being blown away at how high calorie they were despite being so very yummy. I have been wanted coconut macaroons ever since but I haven't been able to bring myself to get them.

Thanks to the trusty internet I was sure that I could find a recipe that at the very least I could adapt to make a lower calorie version of these sinfully delicious treats. I am a huge fan of checking reviews for recipes and I often choose to make the best rated version of any recipe. Tons of websites also have reviews from wonderful people explaining ways to make the original recipe better. Well, the best rated recipes all seemed to contain an entire can of sweetened condensed milk. Talk about calorie dense...condensed milk is about as bad as it gets.

And this is when I happened upon a blog with a recipe from America's Taste Kitchen. Now one of my good friends is always raving about America's Taste Kitchen so I thought this recipe would surely taste good. Like always I used the lowest calorie/fat options I could find. Below is my version of this amazing recipe. The link above will take you to the original version.

Ingredients:

• 2 cups sweetened shredded coconut
• 1/2 bag (4.4 oz) reduced fat, finely shredded unsweetened coconut (I used Lets go...Organic)
• 6 large egg whites (I used egg substitute egg whites)
• 12 packets of Splenda
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp almond extract
• 6 oz dark chocolate for dipping (if desired)
  

Directions:

1. Using a hand mixer, whip the egg whites until they form soft peaks. Add Splenda, almond extract and salt. Continue mixing with the hand mixer for about 30 seconds...or until well blended.
2. Mix in coconut (both kinds) using a spoon. Once mixed used the hand mixer to fluff the coconut and ensure it is well mixed. "Dough" will look like coconut and not like a dough.
   
3. Refrigerate for 15 min. while preheating the oven to 375 degrees.
4. Spoon one heaping tablespoon of the fluffy mixture into your palm. Squeeze the mixture while shaping it into a tight ball. Place about macaroons about 1 inch apart on a silicon baking sheet.
   
5. Cook for 15 min. Remove from oven and allow to cool on the baking sheet.
6. If desired, melt good quality dark chocolate in the microwave and dip cooled macaroons into the chocolate.
   

Makes 40 macaroons: 40 calories each without chocolate. 55 calories with bottom dipped in chocolate.

Double Chocolate Mint Cookies

After deciding not to do anything special for Valentine’s Day I changed my mind and ended up wanting to cook dinner with Miles. I spent hours working on the menu the night before and had everything figured out: Steaks over a bed of spinach and feta cheese, orzo on the size and chocolate lava cakes for dessert.

So on Valentine’s Day I realized that I didn't really want to make chocolate lava cakes for dessert. While I love me some lava cakes I have made them a couple of times recently and they just didn't feel like having them again. So off to the internet I went looking for a new dessert idea. Miles had asked for chocolate so chocolate he was going to get. I finally stumbled across these cookies (from Martha Stewart) and with a few edits I had my recipe. I cut it in half and used a Splenda/sugar combo. I also used dark chocolate instead of the milk chocolate that was in the original recipe. Miles loves mint so a little mint extract and these cookies went from chocolate to minty chocolate heaven.

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
• 1/4 cup unsweetened Dutch-process cocoa powder
• 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/4 teaspoon coarse salt
• 2 ounces semi sweet chocolate chips (I used Ghirardelli)
• 2 ounces dark chocolate (I used Ghirardelli Twilight Delight 72%) cut into 1/4-inch chunks
• 1/4 cup unsalted butter (I used Land -o - Lakes Light butter)
• 1/2 cups sugar
• 4 packets of Splenda
• 1 large egg
• 1 teaspoon mint extract

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Whisk together flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, and salt; set aside. Melt 2 ounces chocolate chips with the butter in a small heatproof bowl set over a pan of simmering water; let cool slightly.
2. Put chocolate mixture, sugar, eggs, and vanilla in the bowl and whisk gently until combined. Gradually mix in flour mixture. Fold in chocolate chunks.
3. Refrigerate dough for 1-2 hours.
4. Using a spoon, drop dough onto parchment-lined baking sheets, spacing 2 inches apart. Bake until cookies are puffy and surfaces crack, about 13 minutes (cookies should be soft). Let cool. Cookies will flatten out as they cool.
   

Makes 14 cookies - slightly smaller than palm sized - calories per cookie = 108