How to Make Brownies, Cookies and Cakes Healthy

Let's face it; America is having a love affair with bad food. And we love nothing more than our sweets. Walk down to any corner store and you will find shelves packed with brownies, cookies, cakes, doughnuts and other sweets. Look at the ingredients list, and you will see three common offenders; white sugar, white flour and hydrogenated shortening. These three ingredients, consumed in large quantities over a long period of time, can spell a death sentence.

The good news is that it doesn't have to be this way. We can have our cake and eat it, too, so to speak. But in order to do that, we must make a few healthy adjustments to what we consider a "normal" recipe.

Recipes for baked goods are actually very flexible. They can withstand a considerable amount of toying, alteration and experimentation. I have subjected a good number of recipes to a torture test to see how much alteration they could handle to make them healthier. Most of them have turned out very well.

The trick to making healthy baked goods is proper ingredient substitution.

Replacing White Flour

The first thing you have to do is get the white flour out of your pantry, and replace it with a high quality, healthy 100% whole wheat flour. I recommend Hodgson Mill, King Arthur and Whole Foods' bulk 100% whole wheat flour. Never use low quality whole wheat flour such as Gold Medal. No matter how much they promote their products, they simply don't measure up to the competition, and are not worth the money you save.

Regular 100% whole wheat flour will work in most baked goods recipes. However, if you find that the texture of the finished product is less than ideal, you can use 100% whole wheat pastry flour. Whole wheat pastry flour is lower in wheat gluten, which is the protein in wheat, and thus produces a smoother product when making baked goods other than yeast bread.

Truth is, when it comes to healthy desserts, you can have your cake and eat it, too.

Credit: agzu (stock.xchng www.sxc.hu)

Copyright: agzu (stock.xchng www.sxc.hu)