Short Side of Life

Recently I have started to try my hand at cooking and baking, specifically diet friendly foods.  My interest in this first came about when my former office manager told me about how you can subsitute a can of diet soda for the eggs and oil in a cake and it should taste the same.  Since Travis is willing to try anything at least once we decided that a taste test was in order.  While the cake did have similar flavors the texture and moistness did not hold up.  I did find that when used in a recipe such as Better Than Sex Cake the differences of the diet cake were not noticeable.  Another low calorie cake recipe that I tried recently called for a can of pumpkin puree instead of oil and eggs.  I have heard of using applesauce to replace oil before, but I have only recently read about using pumpkin.  The recipe was a huge success, the cake was moist and rich and delicious and I had several people at work ask for the recipe.

Many of the diet recipes I have looked through claim that they taste similar to the original recipe.  While this may be true for some things I have found that it is not true for all recipes.  One recipe I found this to be true for was cream cheese brownies.  The recipe that I used for low point brownies was a recipe I found on Weight Watchers’ website.  I had high hopes for it since it included cream cheese, which can make anything delicious.  Turns out the addition of cream cheese was the only part of the brownie that was good. 

More recipes and pictures to follow.