Your Favourite Food Channel aka Healthy Yums

We recently celebrated a birthday with an old friend of mine, and I decided we should bring a healthy birthday cake to the dinner celebration.

I thought of combining our healthy cheesecake recipe with our wholegrain brownies...and Mr. Green and I put our heads together and came up with this...


We played around with our usual brownie recipe to use margarine instead of oil, and much less of it too! We also added plain natural yogurt (low in fat, calories and a good source of protein and calcium) to add moisture to the brownie cake. A typical brownie recipe would use about a cup of butter and we used 1/3 cup of margarine instead :o).

Texture was brilliant. Rich and chewy just the way we like it :o).

As for the middle layer, we used cream cheese, silken tofu and banana with a little lemon for taste :P. I know it might sound icky but seriously, it makes it creamy, and it's much healthier than using all cheese!

Verdict?
Without telling people there was tofu in it...the dinner party seemed very receptive to it. A few even really, really liked it, especially the brownie part.

The minute we admitted to the tofu...people started smacking their lips together and swearing they could taste it :o).

It's psychological, I tell ya. Next time...we're not telling!

Mr Green felt like oatmeal and raisin cookies the other night. For some reason he made them spherical instead of flat and round. Mr Green...why?

I don't know what he did really. I just know it was good, and he reduced as much fat as he could using reduced fat options. He also chose to use digestives for the crust instead of graham crackers.

We could have made it healthier though. A few months ago, we made cheesecake using soft silken tofu instead of cream cheese. We flavoured it with fresh pumpkin and it really did taste like a pumpkin cheesecake, only without all the fat. We got the idea from a recipe that substituted cream cheese with tofutti, a soy-based cream cheese. We figured soy-based? Why not just use Japanese silken tofu which was readily available at the local grocery store...worked like a charm :o).

I'll let Mr Green add on to this when he feels like it.

Let it be known that this blog is not all about successes in the kitchen. In fact, if anything this blog is about failures because healthyyums and I are always looking to experiment and improve on our recipes. So for as many successes as we have there are about twice as many failures. Such is the case with the newest experiment, beet cookies.Remember my oatmeal-raisin cookie recipe? Well I decided to try adding a half a cooked beet to the mix and evaluating the result. However, I didn't follow my own recipe very well, and it seemed to me that the cookie dough was too dry. I began to add soy milk and mix, but I forgot that oats tend to disintegrate under too much mixing (especially in the presence of liquid) and I ended up with what can best be described as purple oatmeal. This I divided up and put into the oven.

The good news is that I couldn't taste any beets! The bad was, well, everything else. I haven't completely abandoned the beet cookies idea, but I'm definitely going back to the cutting board.
P.S. - I might just be crazy, but do these cookies look like animal faces to anyone else?!? Completely accidental...

Did you just do a double take on the title of this entry? :o) Sorry folks, no mistake there. Wholegrain banana brownies...with beets.

If you read my last posting on brownies, you'll remember that I like to use applesauce when baking low-fat brownies. This time however, we had some really ripe bananas that needed eating, and you can substitute pureed banana for butter (or applesauce)...so I figured, why not!

Then I remembered that we had some beets in the fridge thanks to Mr. Green's current beet-craze. I decided to get on board with that, and we mashed some beets and banana together into a red...goo.

So I used that for my brownies, and substituted honey for sugar (using much less than the recipe calls for since the honey we have seems to taste sweeter), popped it into the oven, and hoped for the best!


Verdict? Not too bad. I definitely prefer applesauce over banana though, because you can really taste the banana in baking. The beets? Well I could hardly taste it and somehow the brownies were sticky and chewy just the way we like 'em. It could have probably used a little more honey, but all in all...I'm pretty surprised it worked out so well :o). Who would've guessed beets could be hidden so well in brownies? And I really liked the fact that we added some nutrition to this :o). Yums!

I've been trying for a long time to come up with a really good Oatmeal-Raisin Cookie recipe. The main problem I've been having has involved the hardness of the cooled cookies. I like them to be soft, and have found that the more flour used, the harder the cookies (especially if you are using wholemeal flour). What I like about this recipe is that the cookies come out soft and a little spongy.
Ingredients:
2 tbsp honey
1 tbsp cinnamon
1/3 cup sunflower oil
1/4 cup crushed plain wheat cereal
1 egg
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cup Oats (quick or old-fashioned)
1/2 cup raisins

Preparation:
Preheat oven to 350ºF (176ºC). In large bowl mix the following: honey, oil, egg and whisk until homogeneous (sorry, that's the engineer in me talking - smooth). Add baking soda, salt, cinnamon, and crushed cereal, and repeat. Mix in Oats and raisins and use two spoons to place equal sized balls on an ungreased baking pan (I use parchment paper because I don't have a non-stick baking pan at the moment).

Cooking:
350ºF (176ºC) for 10-12 minutes. Remove from oven when the edges are slightly browned (even if you think they may not be done). Makes about 17 cookies.

Note:
Some people may not like the cinnamon flavor as much as I do. If this is the case you can cut the cinnamon drastically and use as little as 1/2 tsp. Salt is also optional, however I have found that it makes the cookies really addictive (which is good or bad depending on your needs). The overall preparation and cook time combined, from start to finish, is about 30 minutes. Good luck!

I am constantly on a quest to make brownies healthier. I've tried quite a few different recipes, which I'm going to share with you below.

Milo & Hot Cocoa Wholegrain Brownies: Recipe I

I originally posted this recipe on our travel blog, here. This actually tastes more like chocolate cake than brownies. It comes out quite sweet, probably due to the hot cocoa mix, and its strong chocolaty flavour is probably because of the Milo and hot cocoa mix double action.

If you'd like to make brownies but don't have cocoa powder in your cupboard, make do with Milo, or hot chocolate mix. I don't remember if I've tried this recipe using only hot chocolate/cocoa mix without any Milo, but I'm guessing you could probably replace the Milo with only hot chocolate mix.

Ingredients

1 1/4 cups of wholegrain flour (you'll find me using only wholegrain flour if I can help it!)
1/4 cup of Milo malt
1/4 tbs baking soda (the original called for 1 tbs of baking powder, but we didn't have any)
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup of hot cocoa mix
3 beaten eggs
1 cup of brown sugar (we also only use brown sugar)
1/2 cup of butter or margarine (we used 1/3 reduced fat Imperial margarine
2 tbs of skimmed milk (I'd recommend it if you're using baking soda)

Mix dry ingredients, cut in butter. Add eggs. You can add the milk in here if you think it's not moist enough. Pour into greased cake tin (8'' by 8'') and bake for 30 minutes at 350 degrees F.


Flaxseed & Soy Milk Brownies: Recipe II

We really like this recipe. It's got a strong, rich chocolate taste and is lower in sugar than the above recipe. Another way to make this recipe healthier is to replace the canola oil with applesauce, and cut the sugar down to 1 cup of brown sugar.

Note: To make applesauce, boil tart apple wedges for fifteen minutes. Mash them into applesauce.

Note: If you don't have flaxseed, or you don't like the slightly grainy taste it gives, remove the flaxseed and 3 tbs soy milk and use 4 eggs instead of 3.

Ingredients

1/2 cup canola oil (or replace with applesauce and cut down to 1 cup of brown sugar)
1 1/4 cups brown sugar,
3/4 cup cocoa
1/4 tsp salt
1 tbs vanilla extract
1tsp baking powder
3 eggs
1 tbs milled flaxseed
3 tbs soy milk
1 1/2 cups wholegrain flour

Mix dry ingredients. Add in oil. Add beaten eggs (with the 1 tbs flaxseed and 3 tbs soy milk), vanilla extract, add some soy milk if not moist enough. Pour into greased 9'' by 9'' pan and bake at 350 degrees F for half an hour.