Today’s Exercise: 32 minutes on Wii Fit, 9000 steps
One of the major challenges with this low-calorie malarkey is trying to bake something sweet that doesn’t have enough calories to tempt me back to the dark side of cooking. The place where there is enough melted butter to drown an Irishman, all in the name of Snickers pie.
The fact is that in order to make such a move to a low-calorie lifestyle feasible we need those little sweet crutches to hoist ourselves through. For some of us it’s a few Malteasers, maybe a few pieces of Milka or a couple of custard creams. Today’s recipe is in the interest of creating some more leftfield cookies that can satisfy a small post-dinner sugar craving… and this recipe comes all the way from the Ivory Coast.
In the interest of making this as low-calorie and low-fat as possible I have subsituted out regular unsalted butter for Flora light and the caster sugar for Splenda. I’ve baked with many artificial sweeteners in my time, having been on and off diets since the age of 10, and Splenda is definately the best by a country mile. Once tried to make muffins with Canderel… never again.
Ingredients (makes 28-34):
- 315g plain flour
- 160g polenta (not the ready made stuff, the powdered variety)
- 2 tsp baking powder
- 180g Flora Light
- 10 tbsp Splenda
- 1 tsp vanilla essence
- 2 large eggs, not chilled
- 50g corn flakes
- 1 large egg white
Whisk together the flour, polenta and baking powder. In a seperate bowl add the butter and use an electric handwhisk to beat it so that it appears to be slightly fluffy. To the butter add the Splenda and vanilla essence and then whisk until well combined. The add the 2 eggs one at a time, beating the mixture in between each one, then beat until it is very well mixed in. Then mix in the flour mix with a wooden spoon until it forms one large doughy mass.
Seperate this dough out into 28-34 balls, weighing about 20 grams each, and lay them out on a baking sheet. To each of these make them into a flattened donut shape by poking your finger through the middle and forming the ring around it then flattening it slightly on the baking sheet. Once this has been done to all of them stick them into the freezer for 10 minutes so that they firm up.
After you take them out decorate them with the cornflakes by dipping the pieces of cereal in the egg white and then placing them on top of each cookie. You can be as artistic or as slapdash as you want with this really. Then put them in an oven pre-heated to 180 degrees celcius for 16-18 minutes so that they are golden brown on the outside.
Adapted from here
Verdict: I suffer from back problems so to be honest I wasn’t giving the cornflakes bit of the recipe the care and attention I could have. I also didn’t add the icing sugar over the top as I actually couldn’t see the point of doing so.
The cookies, however, were quite nice. The Splenda and the cornflakes actually means that you don’t miss the sugar. However there is a slightly artificial taste from the Splenda and these REALLY do not last long in the cupboard so make them in small batches. The texture too is slightly unusual. What these HAVE given me, however, is the perfect base for a Christmas cookie. So soon this recipe will re-appear in the guise of trees or something else (I haven’t quite decided).
Calorie Count: 80 per cookie
