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.