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

Cinnamon Bread - French Toast

This blog is really turning into a breakfast blog. I am not sure why I enjoy blogging about breakfast more than any other meal but I think it is partially because the pictures turn out so much better when taken in the light of day. Breakfast is really the only meal where most of what I make is made from scratch. Dinner often involves a pre-made sauce or pasta, or it involves a piece of meat that is seasoned and grilled. There just isn't that much that goes into dinner and meals that involve more difficulty are made so often that I don't really find them blog worthy. Trust me, I keep you from a lot of bad or boring meals.

So anyway, this post is about french toast but it is also about the bread I made to make the french toast from. I have been longing to have french toast. On the rare occasion that we go out for breakfast I ALWAYS order french toast. Of course when we do go out the french toast I order is always made from really interesting and wonderful bread. I didn't want to make my own french toast using regular wheat bread and then be disappointed but at the same time I have been looking for a bread recipe that isn't very high in calories, and that I could add yummy things to, for weeks without any luck. Well today I found something I figured I could alter.This recipe from Blissfully Delicious wasn't intended to be made into french toast but it looked so wonderful that I figured I would give it a try. I used light butter and substituted some apple sauce for some of the butter. I also used a combination bread flour and all purpose flour, egg whites only, and I used maple syrup instead of honey as that's that I had on hand. Oh, and I didn't wash it with an egg glaze. I guess with all these changes it isn't even really the same bread but the idea started with Blissfully Delicious so that's where the credit goes.

Ingredients for the bread:

• 6 tbsp warm water
• 3/4 tbsp granulated yeast
• 1/2 tbsp salt
• 6 tbsp egg whites lightly beaten
• 2 tbsp apple sauce
• 2 tbsp maple syrup
• 1 tbsp Splenda
• 4 tbsp light butter melted
• 1 cup all purpose flour
• 1/2 cups + 6 tbsp bread flour
• Cinnamon

Directions:

1. Mix water and yeast and allow to sit while you combine the next ingredients.
2. Combine egg whites, apple sauce, salt, maple syrup, butter, and Splenda in a large bowl. Whisk for about 1 minute to combine the ingredients and make the egg whites nice and fluffy.
3. Add the yeast and water mixture to the other wet ingredients. Then add the flour and mix with the whisk until combined. Do not over mix.
4. Cover and place in a warm location for 2 hours. The dough should double in size while sitting.
5. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
6. Lightly flour your working surface and move the dough to the work area. Add more flour if needed to make your dough manageable. Roll the dough into a large square.
7. Sprinkle cinnamon over the dough to your taste preference. Roll the dough into a log an place an a baking tray wrapping the sides of the log around until they touch on one side of the log.
8. Bake for 35 minutes checking after 30 minutes so as to not over cook.

Makes 12 servings - 100 calories per slice

Ingredients for French Toast:

• Bread from above recipe
• 2 tbsp flour
• 3/4 cup non-fat milk
• 3/4 cup egg beaters
• Cinnamon and nutmeg

Directions:

1. Measure flour into a large mixing bowl. Slowly whisk in the milk. Whisk in the eggs. Add cinnamon and nutmeg to taste. Whisk to combine all ingredients.
   
2. Heat a lightly oiled griddle or frying pan over medium heat.
3. Soak bread slices in mixture until saturated. Cook bread on each side until golden brown. Serve hot.

Makes 12 servings - calories per serving - 125

Squash Gnocchi

Never having made my own pasta and not having a pasta maker I decided to try this gnocchi recipe from the Food Network. This recipe was very easy to follow but as I don't have a ricer I had to kind of fudge that step of the directions. My squash also took over an hour to cook instead of the 30-35 minutes I thought it would take.

I was very nervous about this creation but Miles gave it a big thumbs up so I guess it will be something I will have the opportunity to perfect. These didn't really taste like squash and as I enjoy squash I will probably make them with butternut squash rather than acorn squash next time. I also thought my gnocchi were to large so I will cut a smaller hole in the bag and pipe them more slowly into the boiling water next time I try this recipe.

Ingredients:

• 1 1/2 pound acorn squash
• 1 1/2 cups flour (I actually ended up using more like 1 3/4 cup of flour to get a firmer consistency to my gnocchi)
  
• 2 large eggs
• 1 tsp salt

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.
2. Cut the squash in half or thirds and place on aluminum foil in the oven. Bake until tender when stabbed with a fork, usually 30 to 35 minutes. - Mine took over an hour but I only cut it in half - Remove from the oven and, when it is cool enough to handle, scoop out and discard the seeds and membrane. Scoop the flesh into a strainer placed over a large bowl. Place in the refrigerator so that the squash cools and the liquid drains away. Leave for at least 6 hours or overnight. - very little water drained from my squash so I absorbed a little extra water using a paper towel -
   
3. Add the eggs and salt. Stir well and add the flour, a little at a time, stirring to amalgamate all the ingredients. Using a hand mixer make sure the ingredients are well combined. The result should be soft but not runny.
4. Put the gnocchi into a zip-lock bag or a piping bag. Bring a large pot of cold water to a boil. Add a pinch of salt and allow the water to return to a boil. Cut a hole in the corner of the bag so you can pipe the gnocchi batter into the boiling water. Pipe a small amount of the gnocchi into the water cutting off the dough every cm or so cooking the gnocchi in batches.
   
5. Cook the gnocchi in the boiling water and cook until they rise to the top of the pot. Remove gnocchi and also to drain while cooking the next batch.\

Makes 4 servings - calories per serving -265

Apple Cinnamon and Blueberry Muffins

I made the blue berry muffins from my blog again this morning but instead of making just blueberry I split the batter in half and mixed half with blueberries as before and half with apples and cinnamon. Last time I made these I used Splenda packets in combination with real sugar but last time I was shopping I picked up some granulated Splenda so I decided to try just using the Splenda this time.

These were excellent. Miles loves blueberry but he actually enjoyed the apple cinnamon muffins over the blueberry. The topping was A-M-A-Z-I-N-G! I only made 4 muffins this time and we scarfed them down. You can actually see the steam coming off the inside of the blueberry muffins.

Ingredients:

• 3/4 cups all purpose flour
• 6 tbsp Spenda
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 2 tbsp apple sauce
• 2 tbsp egg whites
• 1/4 cup non-fat milk
• 3 tbs frozen blueberries
• 1/4 apple
• 1 tsp cinnamon
  

Topping:

• 2 tbsp brown sugar
• 1 tbsp flour
• 1/2 tbsp butter - light version
  

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Grease muffin cups or line with muffin liners. I used my Silicon bake-ware so I did not need to grease the muffin cups.
   
2. Combine flour, Splenda, salt and baking powder in a medium sized bowl. Place apple sauce into a 1 cup measuring cup; add the egg whites and enough milk to fill to 1/2 cup. Mix this with flour mixture.
   
3. Split the mixture putting half into the measuring cup. Into the measuring cup add blueberries and fold in gently. Put mixture into two of the muffin tins.
4. To the other half of the batter add 1/4 of an apple, peeled and cubed. Add the cinnamon and mix together. Split into 2 muffin tins. You should now have two blueberry muffins and two apple muffins. The tins should be between halfway and two thirds of the way full.
   
5. Mix topping ingredients with a fork in a small bowl until grainy and sprinkle muffins with crumb topping mixture. Sprinkle the cinnamon muffins with a little extra cinnamon.
   
6. Bake for 20 minutes in the preheated oven, or until done.

Makes 4 muffins: calories per muffin - 145

Crustless Spinach Quiche

This morning I could not decide on what to make for breakfast. I wanted banana waffles with banana glaze, a smoothie with strawberry, banana, and blueberries, yogurt with blueberries, and(or) I wanted eggs with toast. I finally settled on having quiche...something that I hadn't even considered while I was still in bed making my list of breakfast possibilities. This might be the first quiche I have ever made. It was very tasty and very easy to make.

Ingredients:

• 5 tbsp egg white substitutes
• 1 egg
• 4 tbsp fat free feta
• 1 slice nonfat sharp american cheese
• 1/4 cup nonfat sharp cheddar cheese
• 1/4 cup onions diced
• 3 handfuls spinach
• salt, pepper, garlic powder to taste

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Saute onions until nice and brown. Add the spinach until wilted.
3. In a small bowl beat eggs, salt, pepper, and garlic powder. Add cheeses, onions, and spinach to the egg mix.
4. Spray 2 ramekins with a zero calorie non-stick spray such as Pam.
5. Pour the quiche mixture into the the two ramekins, distributing evenly.
6. Cook for approximately 25 minutes or until the eggs have firmed up and the top of the quiche is bubbling.

Serves 2: calories per serving - 150

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