~Sabotage~

Yes, I know baking cupcakes is no way to win a weight loss challenge. I have no idea why but I REALLY wanted to bake cupcakes. I am going to blame it on my failed attempt to win the cupcake giveaway from Sweet Tea Diaries this week. No worries, I sent them to work with Joe!

I really like to try new things with recipes - even if they turn out so bad Joe won't let me feed it to the dogs - it's fun. I had a regular Chocolate Fudge cake mix and thought I'd try some things that I had heard make cake mix more moist and more healthy. The box called for 1/2 cup of oil - I substituted that with 1/2 cup of apple sauce. I was supposed to add 1 1/3 cup of water and I instead added 1 cup of water and 1/3 cup of low fat sour cream. Of course I also added the 3 eggs that were called for. I did not tell Joe of my tweaks until he ate one. Joe has never been accused of being an adventurous eater. He does not like sour cream (I don't know if he's actually ever tried it) and so he wouldn't eat anything that contained sour cream. Anyway, I could dedicate a whole post to the odd food preferences and dislikes of my husband. The cake was good, not significantly more moist than normal, but lower in calories anyway.

The icing was an interesting process too. I made buttercream icing and decided that it was yummy but that the plain white stuff was too boring. This is no problem if you have food coloring on hand, which I thought I did. I was wrong. I happened to still have the jar of peanut butter, from my morning apple and PB, laying on the counter. Light bulb moment! I took half of the icing and added some peanut butter. I used this to top half of the cupcakes. I still had half of the cupcakes to decorate and went rifling through the cabinets to try to find something else to flavor/color the icing. I found a box of strawberry Jello. I figured it was worth a try...especially since that is my favorite flavor. It didn't take much and I had some very pink, very strawberry icing for my other cupcakes.

Now that the cupcake thing is out of my system I feel much better. Oh, and I must explain the "Sabotage" title of this post. Yes, baking in a house on a diet is potential sabotage. However, peanut butter is my husband's Kryptonite. Even worse - chocolate and peanut butter together. This IS a competition :)