Monday morning through Sunday afternoon we try hard to focus on whole foods and keeping extra sugar to a minimum. We have 5 kids and we don’t live in a bubble so this is a formidable task, but it’s the goal. However, Sunday night is dessert night in our house and we enjoy it! I frequently have one of my girls in the kitchen with mixing up a batch of brownies, ice cream or a cake on Sunday afternoon. The catch is that we don’t want a bunch of left overs laying around on Monday morning, nor do we all want stomach aches because we polished off a huge dessert to avoid the left overs. This has led us to experiment with our recipes and we’ve learned a few tricks:
- We love teeny tiny chocolate cakes! I invested in a set of ramekins and I’ve learned if I make a 1/2 batch of brownies or cake batter that we can cook it in these little pans. Bonus is that they frequently cook faster and to make 6 servings we only use 2-3 ramekins and just split 1 dessert to serve 2 people. It’s enough to enjoy the treat and still avoid that heavy, gross feeling in our stomachs when we eat a larger piece. It’s the same basic idea as a cupcake…except we don’t end up with 24 of them! We used this recipe this week for a friend’s birthday and it was delicious! http://cakemerchant.com/2015/09/23/teeny-tiny-chocolate-cake-for-one/
- Same idea for recipe. It comes together quickly, is cooked in the ramekins in the Instant Pot and then we split each one up for smaller portions. https://www.adventuresofanurse.com/2017/01/31/instant-pot-better-sex-chocolate-lava-cake/
- In an effort to weed processed foods out of our regular diet we bought an ice cream maker this year and have been making our own…it’s been delicious! The bonus is that it’s inexpensive, we can adjust the sugar to our liking (we thought the recipe was a little too sweet) and it makes just enough ice cream for each of us to have about 1/2 a cup and to put a cup in the freezer in case some of the kids earn a ‘stay up late with a treat’ prize for doing all of their chores over a period of time. Here’s the recipe we’ve been using: https://www.cuisinart.com/share/pdf/manuals/ice-21_recipe.pdf
- If the recipe doesn’t downsize easily, freeze half of it! It’s such a simple solution that most of us forget it’s an option. We have a birthday in our house almost every month from May-December…that’s a LOT of cake! Most of the time we’ll end up with about half the cake left after the party so I wrap it up well in wax paper and saran wrap and pop it in the deep freeze for the next dessert night. Cooke once, eat twice!
Quick side note: There are a million ways to handle sweets in any house. The method that works for us is certainly not the only way, nor is it the ‘best’ way. I know many people opt for non-traditional ingredients to avoid processed wheat, sugar and fats. We experimented with that and found we didn’t really enjoy the taste or what it did to our grocery budget. In the end, our solution was to use tradition ingredients and put boundaries on how often we eat them. As a coach, I encourage my clients to experiment to find out what works for their families and not worry about what ‘everyone else’ is doing. 🙂
