Substitute ingredients and still enjoy the goodies
Do you love sweets like cupcakes, cookies, and brownies but keep yourself from enjoying them because you don’t want to gain weight? Stop denying yourself the treats you love! You can still enjoy baking and eating your favorite treats by substituting some ingredients for better, healthier, ingredients. Best of all you don’t have to substitute taste. Make your favorite recipes more nutritious, lower in cholesterol, fat, sugar, and carbohydrates.
Eggs are an essential ingredient when it comes to baking. They serve many functions in the baking process. They are a thickener, a moisturizer, and a leavening agent. As much as they do to ensure your recipe a correct outcome, they are loaded with cholesterol. A recipe calling for two large eggs may sound like no big deal, but one large egg alone has about 215 mg of cholesterol. Since two large eggs are needed, that means 430 mg of cholesterol. The daily cholesterol recommendation for someone on a 2,000 calorie diet is less than 300 mg.
You might think that these two large eggs are one small component in cake or a cookie recipe that will produce roughly 20 cookies, so what’s the harm if you only eat a few? When you consider those recipes also call for butter, another culprit of high cholesterol and sugar, all these ingredients combined make for some pretty unhealthy deserts.
You will find substitutes for the usual suspects in some of the most unusual places. Did you know that you can substitute applesauce, bananas, even tofu for eggs? Bananas are a great replacement because they hold air bubbles, and provide moisture. Applesauce works greats as a wet ingredient, and as a binder. Tofu acts as filler and the best part is it takes on the flavor of whatever you are baking. One egg is the equivalent of half a banana, a quarter-cup applesauce, or a quarter cup of whipped or blended tofu.
The same holds true with butter, sugar and other ingredients, which have easier supplements to find. You will find some blatant substitutes for most ingredients, but with a little research and creativity you will never need to deprive yourself of that cupcake again.
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