Suzy Eats

 This week Tuesday Toast is with Abeer from www.cakewhiz.com She is SUPER TALENTED!!! Please check out her website for the BEST cake/dessert recipes and ideas!!! We asked her to make a healthy dessert for our post today. See below and let us know what you think!! 🙂

Hellooooooo to all “Suzyeats” readers! My name is Abeer and I write at cakewhiz.com. I have been following Suzanne’s awesome blog for a little while now and when she asked if I can do a guest posting, I was flattered but also quite surprised since her blog is quite different than mine. Don’t get me wrong… we both write about food but her’s is about healthy eating and mine is about well… not so much healthy eating … lol  :S

But, I do like a challenge. I decided to “healthify” a chocolate cupcake recipe and remove the biggest heart devil: BUTTER!  And, then I decorated these healthy cupcakes to look like pompom flowers…. 

Don’t you just love all the colors?  You can make these too. So, let’s get started…For the cupcakes, you will need the following ingredients :

• 2 eggs
• 1 1/2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
• 1 cup white sugar
• 1/4 cup cocoa powder
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1 tbsp vanilla extract
• 2/3 cups fat free plain yogurt
• 1/2 cup skim milk

And here are the steps:

Step 1: Mix all the dry ingredients with a spoon.

Step 2: Add all the wet ingredients and mix the batter until smooth. If the batter is too difficult to beat, add a few tablespoons of milk.

Step 3: Pour batter into cupcake liners.

A few tips:

• Since this is a chocolate cupcake batter, I prefer using foil liners and this way the brown color doesn’t show through … I find that very unattractive: S
•  Also, since this batter has no oil or butter, I suggest spraying your liners with some olive oil cooking spray so the cake doesn’t stick to liners.
•  These cupcakes rise a lot. Fill your liners a little less than halfway.

Step 4: Bake at 350 degrees for 20 –25 minutes or until an inserted toothpick comes out clean.

These cupcakes were slightly different than my high fat cupcakes in terms of texture since these had a spongy feel to them but other than that… they are tasty, chocolicious healthy cupcakes! You can eat these as is but I liked them with some icing. Now, adding frosting to cakes can never be considered healthy but I made some changes to a basic icing recipe so as to make it slightly better for you. You will need the following ingredients:

• 1/3 cup shortening (shortening has 50% less saturated fat than butter)
• 1 tsp meringue powder (used for icing stability)
• 1 tbsp cornflour or cornstarch
• 3 cups powdered sugar
• 1/4 cup fat free yogurt
• 1 tbsp vanilla powder (I don’t suggest using liquid extract since it would make your icing thin and that’s not entirely suitable for decorating cupcakes).

Here are the steps:

Step 1: Mix all the ingredients and beat until it becomes smooth and creamy.

Step 2: If your icing is too stiff, add water accordingly (1/2 tsp at a time or less). Your icing consistency is perfect when you pick up your beater and peaks form which don’t go flat.

Time for my favorite part: DECORATING! Woohoo! This time, I decided to make pompom flowers to celebrate the coming of spring! I learnt how to make these flowers in Wilton’s cake decorating class. I have modified the original steps a little but you still end up with very pretty pompom flowers. 

Here are the steps:

Step 1: Color your icing pink , yellow and orange using gel colors and fill your decorating bags with them. Attach your tips. You would be needing tip 21 and 12.

Step 2: Using tip 12, squeeze your icing on top of the cupcake…

…and then stop and pull your hand away. A peak will form.

Step 3: Now, use tip 21 and start piping stars all around the bottom.

Step 4: Do the same thing for the layer on top.

Step 5: Keep doing the same thing until you reach all the way to the top and then pipe 1 star in the center and you are done.

Repeat these steps for different colored icings and voila! You will end up with gorgeous pompom flower cupcakes! If this doesn’t scream “spring”, I don’t know what does…lol. You can also follow the same steps on mini cupcakes and make mini pompom flowers. I made a few and they are in the center of this picture. Cute… right?

And here is a close-up of a pink pompom flower…

I guess that’s about it for now. Hope you guys try these out and thanks to Suzanne for letting me share this post with all of you J