Black Bottoms - yummy!

These cupcakes were super delicious, and the cream cheese, chocolate chip, chocolate cupcake mixture blended so well together!  They were a little harder to make than normal cupcakes (especially since I did not have an electric handheld mixer to mix the cream cheese topping together with)!  Other than that, I give these two thumbs up for taste, calorie count, and cuteness!

The recipe can be found here, on the Woman's Day website!  The original recipe called for mini cupcakes, but I made normal size ones, so I only made 2.5 dozen cupcakes instead of 5 dozen, and all the nutritional information doubled for my recipe, so they were 150 calories per cupcake, but well worth it!

If I could make one suggestion, it would be to almost double the cream cheese topping portion of the recipe, because I did run out of it before I ran out of the chocolate cupcake mix, and I was not using as much as the recipe called for.

Chocolate-Pretzel Clusters

Another delicious recipe that I found & wanted to share.  These clusters have pretzels, dried cranberries, & almonds, all covered in chocolate.  They are sweet, salty, chocolaty, and they are less than 100 calories.  I found the recipe in a Family Circle magazine, so I looked it up online, so that I can share it with everyone.  You can find the recipe here.

Since I do not like almonds, but my brother does, I split the recipe up and used different types of nuts.  For the almonds and cashews, I used a 1/4 of what the recipe called for, and for the pistachios, I used a 1/2 of what the recipe called for.  So, when you look at the recipe, for the almonds and cashews, I divided every ingredient by 4, and for the pistachios, I divided every ingredient by 2.  My nutritional values are listed below for each type of cluster that I made, and I rounded each value up to the nearest whole number.

ALMONDS (14 clusters) (Nutritional Info per cluster)

*Calories - 66

*Fat - 4 g

*Carb - 8 g

*Sugar - 4 g

*Protein - 1 g

CASHEWS (12 clusters) (Nutritional Info per cluster)

*Calories - 73

*Fat - 4 g

*Carb - 9 g

*Sugar - 5 g

*Protein - 1 g

Pistachio (20 clusters) (Nutritional Info per cluster)

*Calories - 70

*Fat - 4 g

*Carb - 10 g

*Sugar - 6 g

*Protein - 1 g

So, if you have a sweet tooth, but you are trying to lose weight and stay on track, give these clusters a try.  One or two clusters can satisfy the sweet tooth, without breaking the calorie bank or throwing your weight loss of track.

Delicious Healthy Brownies!

Delicious brownies that are healthier for you than most other sweets.  These brownies have less than 100 calories per serving, and they are made from black beans.  Yes, I said black beans!  They were absolutely delicious!  My brother was not going to eat them, but he gave one of them to his one of his daughters, and she said that they were great and tasted fudgy.  So, he decided that he would try them.  He said that he preferred the box brownies, but that is because they are filled with preservatives.  He tried extremely hard to taste the black beans in the brownies, and he couldn't.  They were a great hit with both of my nieces, and I would definitely recommend them to anyone who has a sweet tooth and is trying to lose weight.

For the recipe, you can follow the link below: http://www.doctoroz.com/videos/rocco-dispiritos-fudgy-fruit-nut-bars

This recipe calls for cutting the brownies into 12 equal squares, but I did 15 equal squares, so that the brownies were under 100 calories each.  The nutritional facts for my batch of brownies is per brownie:
* Calories - 97
* Fat - 0.7 g
* Carbs - 20.4 g
* Sugar - 12 g
* Protein - 3.3 g

In addition, I could not find the espresso powder that was called for in the recipe, so I just left it out.  They still tasted great!