Healthy (ish) Sweets

Okay, okay, okay. Last week my post was about getting back on track with healthy eating and exercise. This week my house is redolent with aromas of peanut butter, sugar and chocolate. What the heck?

But.

They are healthy (ish) sweets!

Last week we had very few sweets in the house and Hub decided he had a bad sweet tooth. Of course, he’s supposed to be gluten-free, but it didn’t stop him from going out and buying some boxed mixes to make himself up some desserts.

I am no baker, so the fact I entered my kitchen and turned on the oven made for a blog-worthy post. Here’s why:

• I’m about as un-perfect as you can get and baking requires precision.
• I don’t need to eat sugar.
• When I bake it, I tend to eat it (see above).
• Turning on our oven is a several-hour event. The fan keeps running at least an hour after the oven goes off.
• I rarely have all the ingredients I need – because I rarely bake.

Most of us now live in a world where we are trying to use up what we have and not make any extra trips to the store if we don’t have to. With as seldom as I bake, whipping out baking supplies would mean I would either have to make a trip to the store or use expired goods.

If, of course, I didn’t have my secret weapon! Here’s my biggest tip for those wanting to occasionally bake – keep your baking ingredients in the freezer. Dry ingredients freeze very well and I have had no problem baking with them.

For these two recipes I also used frozen mini chocolate chips and frozen mini marshmallows. Both were sealed in John’s sealer (similar) and were as good as fresh.

Here were my objectives.

• Make something edible.
• Aim for something somewhat healthy.
• Keep gluten free.
• Use ingredients I have on hand.
• Spend as little time in the kitchen as possible.

I met all my objectives, whipped up some health(ish) sweets, served up one of each and froze the rest. The good news? John did all the clean up!

Chewy Flourless Chocolate Chip Cookies

I used a recipe from A Simple Palate. I only had chunky peanut butter and used regular brown sugar instead of coconut sugar, but everything else was the same.

My cookies looked absolutely NOTHING like hers, but they turned out pretty tasty nonetheless. There were only six ingredients, so SCORE.

Low Fat Rice Krispy Treats

First of all, it’s crazy I would even have ingredients to make these treats. What family has marshmallows on hand if they don’t also have children on hand? We had some mini marshmallows from the Christmas cocoa bar and as an experiment, John sealed them in his sealer and today I took them out of the freezer and voila – they were perfect.

I used a recipe from Skinnytaste (which I often cite on my blog) and made a couple of substitutions.

For Rice Krispies, I had a box of Trader Joe’s Crisp Rice Cereal. This cereal is quite different from the other brand, but tasty in its own way. As a bonus, it’s GMO free and organic. Win.

I didn’t have the amount of marshmallows needed, so I basically cut the recipe in half and made a small pan which is better for our household anyway. The other super nice thing is that with a smaller amount of cereal, it’s much easier to stir into the melted marshmallow and went into the pan like a snap.

What I’m Reading

I have really been in a reading funk for a couple of weeks and it’s gotten me down. I have a copy of Vanity Fair that’s been sitting on my bookshelf for years. It’s so daunting because it’s THICK and the print is small. Really small.

But.

I picked it up planning to hate it like I’ve hated everything lately. And guess what? I love it. I have no idea if I can finish it this week, but I’ll write a review when I finally read it.

On audio I finished Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. As I mentioned over the weekend, I read this book years ago and decided to give the audio version a go.

Oh boy. Am I glad I did. It felt so timely to me. You may be familiar with this time travel book. Sort of scifi before scifi was a thing, I’m thinking. It’s about a person who is yanked out of his normal life and creates, through wit and science, a full and happy existence in his new reality.

Twain’s excitement about science and the new technology of the late nineteenth century are apparent and contagious. His commentary on slavery, religion, politics feel current and something like civil discourse, as biting as they may be.

The vernacular is fresh and easy to understand. While disturbing to think about how little we’ve evolved over hundreds of years, it’s nice to know the conversation hasn’t died and we can still have hope for a better society.

On a much lighter note, Roxy really helped me out with this post and I cannot tell you how much it’s appreciated.

I wish you a wonderful week full of God’s blessings.