Have you been missing the aroma of home?
Are you trying to embrace a healthy life but are too unafraid of missing out on the flavors and fun?
Do you feel that you might lose significant family traditions if you continued to stick to a calorie-restrictive?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, then this article is just the right spot for you!
Baking has always been a fun memory for a majority of people. Whether it is the DIY cake for your child’s birthday, plum and berry pie with grandma, warm butter cookies on a Christmas evening, or piping hot lasagna for Sunday brunch; all these recipes evoke happy memories that are not marred by the number of calories consumed.
It is a stress relieving activity that allows you to self-indulge in the warm and gooey goodness that comes out of the oven and spreads a smile on every face in the room. The reason why we are waxing so poetic about baking right now is because we want you to bask in the happy memories.
Now that you can practically smell the comfort food from college days and your childhood let’s team up to bring a healthier twist to our baking habits.
Here is a quick guide to help you cut calories without compromising on the taste of your baking adventures. Let’s get started!
Substitute Fat In The Recipes
Yes. We know that you want to enjoy baking with your family and continue the tradition of decorating birthday cakes like your mom used to do with you, but that doesn’t mean you cannot opt for a healthier variation of cake recipes!
You can easily utilize strained prunes, mashed bananas, applesauce, and any other pureed fruits instead of fat in the cake recipes. These natural emulsifiers will provide the same moisture and texture, but they will also add a rich flavor to your baked goodness.
Spice Up The Fruit Pies
Fruit pies are a lot of fun. While you may enjoy the process of cookies, the pie fruits in sugars, and other sweeteners, there is a quick hack to cut down calories from this family favorite recipe as well! Instead of cooking your fruits in buckets of sugar, you can slow-cook the fruits with cinnamon and other spices!
This will not only perk up the taste-buds but also bring out a fresh and delicious taste from the fruits too! Vanilla, honey, and maple syrup are ideal for this trick if you have a soft spot for sweet flavors in your heart!
Pro-tip: you can cut out fat from pies by using a low-fat graham cracker crust! It may take some time to get used to, but once you do, then there’s only smooth sailing in the future!
Healthy Icings On The Cake
You can swap the butter icing for cake tops with the healthier drizzles of glacé, that is a water-based icing. It cuts down the calories and allows you to skip a workout! Other techniques of making icings healthy include dusting cake tops with a lighter coat of icing sugar and stencils to get a professional look on all your healthy cakes. So start designing your cake on your favorite cake decorating turntable to prepare healthier savories to treat yourself.
The sugar-high induced by a divine buttercream or ganache can be achieved by using ricotta cheese filling with yogurt and half a tablespoon of sugar.
You can add complex flavors like passion fruit, matcha, lime juice, and even flower waters to ensure perfection!
Pick The Perfect Pastry
Pastry is not known to be the best for your lipid profile, but its ambrosia-like flavor cannot be given up so quick! There is a lot of variation in the types and amount of fat used to make the pastry dough, and that is all you need to be mindful of!
Traditionally, a third of the shortcrust or puff pastry is fat that is derived from butter and oils. It is a carrier of saturated fats that need to be limited for special days alone.
In the meanwhile, you can pick the unsaturated fats like sunflower spread to make healthier pastry or even swap the popular types with an option like filo. The filo pastry has a flakier texture when compared to the shortcrust, but it definitely is a scrumptious addition for your tarts and even sweet pies!
Switch To Oil From The Buttery Goodness
While butter and lard are the best saturated fats used in your bakes, you can conveniently swap them with a better option like extra-virgin olive oil. The olive oil and other cold-pressed seed oils can give you a smooth dough that is moist and rich in flavor but also carries a fraction of the total calories from the original recipes.
Bake Your Bread Without Salt
If you love baking bread, then this tip is just for you!
Bread is one of the staple food items that remain hot-sellers in most bakeries across the streets. While they may not be the saltiest food consumed every day, they still have a prominent spot in salt contributions to our diet.
We all know that excessive salt can lead to serious health conditions like high blood pressure; we believe that baking our own bread would be a safe and better option!
The use of a wholegrain flour will help you boost the fiber content of your bread and also give a satisfying softness to each bite from the loaf.
Play Tricks With The Texture
The use of nuts and seeds in your baking can give you the double benefit of crunch and calorie-restriction to your diet! The nuts tossed on top of your bread and folded in your muffins will release a nutritious oil under the oven heat and give you a regal flavor at the end of the day!
If you don’t like the texture of nuts and seeds, then you can easily blitz them in a grinder and then add them to the dry ingredients in the recipes!
You can even swap milk chocolate out to use dark chocolate for your death-by-chocolate recipes! It has far less sugar and much more flavor! You even get a boost in cognitive functioning with an addition like this! It’s a win-win!
Final Thoughts – Watch What You Eat!
While we can give you a lot of advice on what fats to use and what flavors to avoid, at the end of the day, it is the portion size that truly matters. If you continue to indulge in the traditional recipes, then eating smaller portions are longer intervals will help you out more.
Just make sure that baking keeps you happy instead of becoming a cause of worry about the number of calories in every bite you consume! If that’s sorted, then there is nothing else that needs to be done!