Friday 13 January 2012

Cinnamon Chocolate Diet Muffins

I like SparkPeople, it has some good tips and articles, plus being able to record your intake and exercise is really useful.

The one frustrating thing with it is the fact that most of the recipes are written in American. I'm gradually working out how to convert Fahrenheit (or just 'degrees' as it's often listed, burnt a few things making that mistake) to gas mark and cups to real measurements. As ranted about here. but one of the problems thats hard to get past is the random products that seem to exist only in America and that also seem to be really popular with dieting sites in general.

What is the obsession with apple sauce? It's a thing you buy to put with pork, leave in the cupboard and then throw out when it gets manky. Seriously, search on a site like mysupermarket and you'll find three varieties - 'own brand', 'cheap own brand' and Colmans. Considering that sugar is the third ingredient in each case I doubt it would be classed as diet food. It must be one of those things that doesn't export well, like canned pumpkin puree.

I found this recipe for Applesauce Oatmeal Muffins on SparkPeople, but had no real desire to make applesauce from scratch, so I replaced it with Nutella (any Hazelnut Chocolate Spread would do, check your calorie count not all spreads are created equal). I also replaced the two egg whites with one egg as it seemed like a waste of eggs.

The end result is a mildly chocolatey but very satisfying muffin for only 119 calories. And they freeze well so a batch will last a while.

2 comments:

Chrissy said...

I would expect them to have 50% more calories if you used Nutella instead of applesauce :p

Phantoms Siren said...

Sorry, that should say 'fake nutella' which has a lower calorie count, works out about 20 extra calories over the original recipe.