Sometimes, especially in the winter, all you want to do is spend the day in sweat pants and bake with Groundhog Day on TV in the background. Although, this can easily put you in a dieter's remorse come Monday when you realize you didn't get to the gym and have eaten a whole cake to yourself. Remorse no more... Using a good recipe base with some tweaks and other tactics, you can still fully indulge in one of these lazy baking days with majorly reduced guilt.
Use an Angel Food Cake Base
I found this remarkable recipe through Pininterest for Blue Velvet Cake With Cream Cheese Frosting. The photo was enough for me to think there was no way I could make this and not gain 3 pounds overnight. But after reading through the recipe, I noticed the lovely and talented blogger Eva Marie Kosmas made this recipe with an angel food cake base. Sure I've had angel food cake, but I never thought about making it from scratch. It's a remarkably good reduced guilt cake recipe!
Don't be afraid to tweak aspects of a recipe
The cake itself is mostly made from whipped egg whites and the icing can be tweaked with less sugar and non or low fat cream cheese. So last Sunday my good friend Jessica and I made this exact recipe except for the icing, where we used only 2 cups of powdered sugar, 8 TBPS of butter, low fat Neufchatel cream cheese, and I only used about 2/3 of it all when icing the cake. It was remarkable. And amazingly, each "wedding sized" slice was under 200 calories.
Don't keep the entire cake in your kitchen
Sure I had a nice well deserved, hearty slice of cake right after we iced it, but by the next day I only had about a quater of the whole cake left to ration throughout my week. So think about it... Jessica and I had our first "we did an awesome job" slices, then I made her take a third of the cake home with her, and then I brought another third of what was left into my office. Does that leave me with a quarter? Well regardless of the math, I only had a very small fraction of the cake left to my disposal. So, not only did my coworkers love the 3:37pm treat, but it automatically reduced my ability to over indulge in the cake throughout the week to come.
I also used this technique with the dozens of Christmas cookies my mom sent me back with after visiting home for the holidays. While I absolutely adore them, I live by myself now and certainly didn't want to eat them all myself. So I brought about half of them to my new downstairs neighbors that now every morning bring in my newspaper and put it upstairs at my front door. It's a win-win!
So you see you really don't have to deprive yourself of all things awesome when you're trying to stay on track to weight loss goals or an overall healthier lifestyle. With many challenges for healthy eating remember that you can make tweaks, keep it in proportion, and still have fun in your kitchen.
Do you have a recipe for a seemingly "bad food" that makes it reduced guilt? Share them below so other readers and I can give them a shot too!