Even though I just may be the biggest chocolate lover on the planet, I find creating original recipes for fabulous low-fat desserts to be more challenging than creating recipes for any other category of food. In fact, years ago, after writing my first magazine article about desserts, I swore I would never write another one. Then I found myself faced with this chapter.
The challenge is straightforward: If I cook a burger and think it needs more salt, I can simply add it and retaste it. If I think muffins need more salt, I have to start from scratch. Though all the dessert recipes in this book are a breeze to make, getting them to that point—so you can achieve perfect consistency—can drive a gal a little wacky.
And then there’s the fact that I have zero willpower when it comes to desserts (even failed ones in many cases), and for months, I found myself sitting over not-yet-perfected buckets of cookies, cakes, and brownies “not good enough to give away,” but perfectly fine for me. It’s a minor miracle that I’m still small enough to fit on the cover of this book. And I’m pretty sure you’ll see why I say that after one bite of the Cinnabon.
What Goes Into the Perfect Dessert?
Fat Substitutes
A lot of people in search of lower-fat desserts swap baby food, pureed prunes, and/or applesauce for the butter or oil in their favorite baked goods. Some even swear by putting pureed beans in brownies, which is too horrifying a thought for me personally (I really don’t like beans) to even consider for a minute. Others believe that light butter just plain doesn’t work in baked goods. Heck, I’ve even seen packages of light butter with a note advising against substituting light butter in baked goods (my opinions on that later). Clearly, the opinions are quite mixed.
Yogurt
If you take a quick look at the ingredients in this chapter, you’ll find that like most chefs, I favor certain ingredients. First, I use yogurt as a substitute in most of my cakes and muffins. It’s been my personal experience after trying applesauce and other types of fruit purees that yogurt, in the right combinations, works best. Unfortunately, I can’t provide any easy rule of thumb for knowing how much yogurt to substitute for fat—until I’ve perfected a recipe, I’ve found it’s always a bit hit or miss—but again, after multiple attempts, 9 times out of 10, I find that yogurt gives consistently wonderful results.
Light Butter and Reduced-Fat Cream Cheese
Another ingredient that I consistently use is light butter—the type that’s packaged in sticks just like regular butter or margarine. Yes, there is water added to it, which some argue will add excess moisture to your baked goods and ruin them. True, this is a possibility, but again, with some careful tweaking and mindful attention to compensating for the extra moisture, I often find light butter to be a friend, not a foe. Please note that light butter is different from light butter spread, which is sold in tubs. Though some recipes in this book do call for light butter spread, the two are, for the most part, not interchangeable. Likewise, in these recipes, 1⁄3-less-fat cream cheese (Neufchâtel) that is sold in blocks should not be replaced with any whipped or cream-cheese spreads that are sold in tubs.
Egg whites are another ingredient that you’ll find in recipe after recipe. And with these, I do find the substitutions to correspond consistently; I almost always substitute two egg whites for one whole egg. Now, some people use egg substitutes, but I prefer not to. I think that because the consistency is thinner, egg substitutes alter my finished product ever so slightly. So I avoid them unless the original recipe was developed using them.
Ice Cream
You may notice that I suggest fat-free, sugar-free ice cream in the milkshake recipes. Though I’ve never been a proponent of the low-carb movement, I’ve sampled plenty of low-carb and sugar-free products, only to have horrible stomach pains afterward.
Vanilla fat-free, sugar-free ice cream has never had this effect on me, and I truly believe that it (or at least the brands at my local grocery store) tastes much more like real vanilla ice cream than any frozen yogurt found at the grocery store (though not necessarily the ones found at frozen-yogurt shops). Plus, fat-free, sugar-free ice cream provides some fiber, which makes you feel fuller and more satisfied with smaller amounts. Add that to the fact that it has fewer calories than others, and it was the perfect choice in my mind.
Did you ever notice that if you take a bowl of ice cream and mash it with a spoon until it softens, it then looks like you’ve already eaten some because it appears there’s less there? Or have you ever eaten soft-serve frozen yogurt and found that whatever is left at the bottom of your cup looks noticeably smaller after it has melted?
I thought about experiences like that when I discovered (the hard way) that if you put 16 ounces of ice cream in a blender with ¼ cup of milk and some chocolate syrup, you don’t even have a 16-ounce shake by the time it’s blended. (You might if the ingredients are extremely cold and you have a very high-powered or special blender, but typically you won’t.) It was a huge challenge to figure out how to get some air back into the shakes since I didn’t want to add so many calories from ice cream. Sadly, this is the only challenge I didn’t conquer to my satisfaction.
Though I talked to two of the country’s premier food scientists and did a slew of research and trials, the suggestions I received were not conducive to including them for use at home. A $500 blender was one solution. Adding maltodextrin was another, but I’ve found it is not quite as available as I’d like. So basically, I decided to stick to suggesting that you exercise portion control with the milkshake recipes.
Does the 31st ounce of a milkshake really satisfy anything that the first 8 ounces didn’t? Too much of a good thing, or in the case of a milkshake, one might argue, a great thing, really can be a bad thing.