Lean and Lovin' it: Tempt your valentine with guilt-less brownies
I've never been more happy to admit I was wrong.
Upon realizing recently that fat doesn't make people fat, sugar does, I waved goodbye to many of the low-fat desserts I've created over the years, like my Double Chocolate Chip Fudge Brownies. That not so fond farewell was based on the assumption that since sugar is the foundation of most sweet baked desserts, a no-added-sugars dessert — like those brownies that require sugar for structure and flavor — would not be possible.
Not one to give up that easily, I turned to the Internet and have since learned that chocolaty low-fat brownies that don't rely on articial sweeteners are possible.
My cyber search led me to sugarfreemom.com, a website started by Brenda Bennett, a mom, who writes that she's maintained a 50-pound weight loss for eight years. I liked the sound of that since I've also found it easier to lose weight and keep it off, since I kicked sugars to the curb.
On her site, Bennett shared her recipe for a sugar-free brownie and I quickly headed to a nearby natural foods store to get a few ingredients not already in my pantry: sugar-free chocolate chips and pure stevia extract.
I didn't buy liquid stevia because it was expensive ($8 for 2 ounces) and I already had organic stevia in packets. Since I had organic all-purpose flour available in my pantry too, I went with that instead of the whole wheat pastry flour Bennett used.
I did buy one ingredient, the one I'd never seen before: Lily's brand dark chocolate, no sugar added, baking chips ($6.99 for 9 ounces). Lily's sweetens its chips with stevia and erythritol, a sugar alcohol, about 1 calorie per chip. Really!
But the chips aren't free of calories (110 per ounce versus a traditional chip's 151). Regular semisweet chocolate chips deliver 15-17 sugar grams to Lily's zero grams. Big difference.
Bennett uses unsweetened applesauce to cut fats, though she doesn't drain it as I do. She likes butter (who doesn't?) and suggests that coconut oil works well, too. I went with coconut oil since I like coconut's flavor, especially with chocolate.
Back in my kitchen I mixed together all the ingredients with my tweaks. Despite lacking 2 cups of sugar (from my original recipe), the batter looked similar to my brownie batter. After stirring in the no-sugar-added chocolate chips I baked-off my version of Bennett's brownies.
While they baked, I tasted the chocolate chips and found the flavor and sweetness decent, though I also noticed a slight cooling on my palate, a result of the chips' erythritol ingredient.
After 20 minutes I pulled the brownies from the oven and I noticed that they'd pulled away from the pan's sides and my toothpick tester came out bone dry. Perhaps my shift from Bennett's 8-by-8-inch pan to my 7-by-11-inch pan made more of a difference than I thought it would.
After they cooled, I cut a square and tasted it. My granulated stevia substitution for Bennett's liquid stevia extract hadn't sufficiently sweetened my brownies and they were slightly over baked.
I bumped-up the stevia and baked the next batch for slightly less time and “Wow!” That batch looked and tasted like my old high-sugar-content brownies. When I did the math I found that I'd cut an amazing 1,546 calories (per batch) compared to my old no-fat-added brownies that used sugar.
They're still not calorie free, but they let me indulge in a sweet ending to a meal without adding not-so-sweet pounds on my scale. Give these no-sugar-added brownies a try and let me know what you think of them. They could be a sweetheart of an ending to a homemade Valentine's Day dinner.
• Don Mauer welcomes questions, comments and recipe makeover requests. Write to him at don@theleanwizard.com.