Skinny Chocolate Peanut Butter Birthday Cupcakes

I’m getting hungry just looking at these little beauties.

My husband turned the big 3-0 last week! Yay! Now, I still have approximately one year and four months until I hit that milestone, so I can enjoy taunting him that I’m still in my 20’s and he’s not. Yes, I know what you’re thinking, and he is one lucky man to have such a mature little wife.

Turning Cupcakes Into Low-Calorie Foods

When I asked my he wanted for his birthday dessert, my husband requested that I whip up a batch of cupcakes. Chocolate cupcakes to be specific. That’s when my mission to figure out how to make cupcakes in a healthier manner began.

If you’re thinking that I’m crazy and cupcakes cannot ever be placed in the low-calorie foods category, you are sorely mistaken my friend. I strongly believe that anything can be lightened up, including birthday cupcakes.

As usual when I’m looking for a delicious low-fat recipe, I headed to Skinnytaste and found exactly what I was looking for. And no, although the reindeer are pretty fantastic, I decided they probably weren’t appropriate for a 30 year old’s birthday. I’m certain this recipe will reappear at Christmas time though…

To turn cupcakes into healthy desserts, apparently all you have to do is alter the ingredients you add to boxed cake mix. Why didn’t I know about this years ago?! Instead of adding the standard vegetable oil, eggs, and water to the mix, you simply swap it for plain Greek yogurt, egg whites, and water. I used Pillsbury Sugar Free Devil’s Food Premium Cake Mix, but you can use any brand and flavor you desire.

Plain Greek yogurt is the most versatile food on the planet.

So, if you dared to say that cupcakes can’t be turned into low calorie foods, eat these nutrition stats (per cupcake):

• Calories: 87

• Fat: 2.3g

• Carbs: 19g

• Protein: 2.8g

Magical Low-Fat Peanut Butter Frosting Recipe

Icing and cupcakes go together like hummus and pita bread — they need each other, because… they just do!

Unless I’m purposely trying to make the people I’m feeding fat, I’m a firm believer in not buying canned icing. Admittedly, it’s good, but it’s so bad for you that I can’t justify it when finding a low-fat frosting recipe is so easy.

My husband and I are both obsessed with peanut butter, so I knew I’d score some points on the awesome wife scale if I could find a frosting recipe made from this creamy deliciousness. And voila, I found this amazing Low-Fat Peanut Butter Frosting Recipe*, from Created by Diane. So. Crazy. Good. Mmm!

When I told him I was making low-fat peanut butter frosting, I could see the love burning in my husband’s eyes. I’m not sure if it was for the peanut butter icing or for me, but we’ll just say it was the latter.

Do your best not to sit and eat an entire bowl of this peanut butter frosting, but the one tsp it takes to cover the top of a cupcake will barely register on your daily calorie intake. Here’s the nutrition stats (per tsp):

• Calories: 27

• Fat: 0.7g

• Carbs: 4.5g

• Protein: 0.8g

*I swapped regular peanut butter for it’s low-fat counterpart and cut a bit of the powdered sugar.

So, now you know how to make cupcakes and peanut butter frosting in a low-fat, no guilt manner. Now get yourself into the kitchen and whip up a batch!

Our Quick & Easy Healthy Little Easter Dinner

My aunt and uncle always a big family Easter Sunday celebration at their farm, but this year we were out- of- town for a wedding the night before, so we spent the day on the road traveling home. Although we were sad to miss Easter dinner with the family, being the maid-of-honor at my best friend from high school’s wedding was probably a pretty good excuse!

Making the “scenic” five hour drive across the state of Pennsylvania kept us busy for a good part of the day, but I didn’t want to make us miss out on the entire holiday. Easter dinner can be fantastic whether you’re dining with 30 people or wellll…. two. In this case our holiday dinner party consisted of the two of us — my husband and I.

Though we spent most of the day traveling, I still wanted to make a delicious dinner, because who wants to eat Easter dinner takeout style? Also, even if we did want to make it easy and order in, most places are closed by Easter Sunday evening. We actually learned this the hard way one year when Easter dinner was served very early, and there wasn’t much of it. Finding any open establishments in our area proved to be quite tricky.

After riding in the car for five-plus hours knew I wasn’t going to want to make a whole huge spread, but it’s the thought that counts, right? Here’s the healthy, delicious, easy recipes I chose for our little Easter dinner for two:

Appetizer

Mmm delicious homemade pita chips…

I made this recipe for Thyme Pita Chips from The Divine Addiction last week and it was such a hit that I decided to do it again! You can’t beat dinner recipes that are both easy to make and delicious. The only modification I made was spraying the pita chips with olive oil, instead of drizzling them with the real thing, to cut down the fat.

I paired this with store-bought hummus, because honestly I made hummus once and it was disgusting. I’ll leave that one to the professionals.

Main Course
I ended up choosing Skinnytaste Zucchini Lasagna as our main course, because honestly I’d never noticed this recipe on the site before and it was insta-love! Hello low-carb lasagna! I actually made this little dish of culinary brilliance on Thursday evening and put it in the freezer, so all I had to do was take it out and deposit it in the oven.

Oh and I also made few slight modifications to it as well, mainly just swapping 99% fat-free ground turkey for the beef, using Kraft fat-free shredded mozzarella cheese instead of Parmigiano Reggiano, trading 1% cottage cheese for ricotta, and subbing olive oil spray in place of the real thing.

This turned out a little soupy, so I just made my husband dish it out. Haha.

Side Dish
I thought I had my side dishes figured out, then I found this recipe for Skinnytaste Bacon Wrapped Green Bean Bundles on Pinterest, and I knew I HAD to surprise my husband with it. The man LOVES his bacon! I just swapped Butterball low-sodium turkey bacon in place of the real thing to cut some of the fat out.

Green beans wrapped in turkey bacon – what’s not to love?!

To top it off, we stopped at a grocery store in Philly on our way home for a baguette. No guilt on that little splurge either, as most everything else is impressively lite on carbs, if I do say so myself.

These healthy, easy recipes allowed my husband and I to have a delicious little feast on Easter evening, without a whole lot of work!

Try My Healthy Mexican Pizza Recipe

My homemade Mexican pizza is muy bueno. Ole!

Everyone loves pizza. If they say they don’t, they’re lying. I am certainly not the exception to this fact.

Because I’m passionate about being annoying health conscious, my fiancee and I have only ordered pizza once to-date during our three plus years together, but that doesn’t mean I deprive the poor man of that cheesy goodness. I’m a big fan of making healthy homemade pizza, partially because it’s easy and impossible to mess up, and of course also because it’s good!

I’m a strong believer that making homemade pizza is a brilliant move, because you still get fantastic tasting pizza, but with TONS less fat and calories than that greasy garbage they serve at Domino’s or Pizza Hut. If you eat my pizza, you’ll still be able to fit into your pants the next day.

Why get fat with takeout pizza when you can make your own and save tons of calories?

The Jerp’s Healthy Mexican Pizza Recipe

What you’ll need:

• 1 can store brand pizza crust (what’s not to love about something cheap and easy… wink wink)
• 1 jar salsa (as mild or hot as you like it)
• 1 can black beans
• 1 pepper
• 1 bag MorningStar Farms® Meal Starters® Grillers® Recipe Crumbles™
• 1 bag iceburg shredded lettuce
• 1 1/2-2 cups fat-free shredded cheddar cheese

Bake the pizza crust for around 15 minutes to get it nice and crispy. Meanwhile, brown the fake meat in a pan on the stove. Then put all the ingredients on that beautifully (almost) crispy crust and shove it in the oven for 15 minutes or so. And ta-daaaa you cooked!

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Delicious Healthy Taco Salad

 Healthy taco salad is so good it’s easy to forget about its fatty twin.

Traditional taco salad is anything but healthy. Situated in a giant edible “bowl” a.k.a. a fried fat bomb, lettuce and veggies are suffocated under massive piles of shredded cheese, sour cream, ground beef, and salad dressing. For example, Taco Bell’s Fiesta Taco Salad with beef packs in 720 calories and 35 grams of fat. Eww! It should be illegal to even call this a salad, because it is not. Thankfully I decided to believe in the concept of the taco salad. I knew there had to be a way to make it actually be a legit, healthy salad, without losing its Mexican flair. This my friends is how my healthy taco salad was born.

I’m always trying to come up with cheap recipes, because well I’m really cheap. If I’m going to spend a lot of money on food, it’s going to be on something at a snazzy restaurant that I don’t have to make, not on groceries for dinner at chez couch. Not only is my healthy taco salad legitimately low-fat, it has also earned the number one spot on my go-to list of cheap recipes, for when I’m feeling extra thrifty.

How to Make Healthy Taco Salad

Ingredients:

• Baby spinach leaves
• Fat-free shredded cheddar cheese
• MorningStar Farms® Meal Starters® Grillers® Recipe Crumbles™
• Salsa
• Avocado (no more than 1/4 avocado per salad)
• Peppers
• Black olives (optional)

You’re intelligent people, and most of you likely cook better than I do, so I’m not going to waste your time by explaining how to craft these ingredients into a salad. For the most part, use as much of the ingredients as you feel is necessary to fill you up, unless otherwise noted. Use the salsa in place of salad dressing. It has like five calories and zero grams of fat per serving, and it’s delicious!

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Try This Healthy Birthday Cake Recipe

Last Thursday was my 28th birthday. I know holidays and special occasions, such as birthdays, are a legit excuse to skip the healthy dinner and whip up a super high-fat birthday cake recipe, but I don’t typically subscribe to that. For the past few years I’ve been skipping the birthday splurges, and instead choosing healthy options that don’t leave me a year older with a food hangover the next day. Don’t get the idea that I’m opposed to fatty splurges though, because I’m so so not.

Birthday flowers!

I wanted a healthy dinner for my birthday, so I chose Aladdin’s Eatery, one of my favorite restaurants. Pretty much everything on the Middle Eastern menu is both healthy and amazingly delicious. Obviously my birthday dinner was a complete success, as I was able to stuff my face with delightful foods like baba, hummus, and tabouli, and I could still fit in my pants the next day. What’s not to love about that?

After our healthy dinner at Aladdin’s we headed back to my parents’ house for cake and presents. In order to please the birthday girl, my mom whipped up her healthy birthday cake recipe, so I would well just shut up about calories and eat cake. And that I did!

Check out my healthy birthday cake!

Try My Mom’s Healthy Birthday Cake Recipe:

Ingredients

• 1 Angel Food Cake (make it, buy it from the bakery, whatever rocks your socks)
• 1 Container of Cool Whip
• A Bunch of Cut Fruit (we typically use strawberries and blueberries, but I’m sure pineapples, kiwis, mangoes, raspberries, and etc. would work great too)

Ice the cake with the cool whip, then decorate it with fruit. Nice and easy!

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Healthy Eating — Try My Delicious Orzo Recipe!

Healthy eating is easy with this orzo recipe!

I like to make healthy recipes that other people come up with, but I’m not exactly known for having any culinary genius of my own. In fact, until the other day it never even occurred to me that I could attempt at coming up with my own healthy recipes. 

I found myself in a dilemma this past Sunday, as on the way to our weekly farmer’s market trip, my boyfriend and I decided to have one of our little healthy eating Sunday night cookouts for two. The only side dish food I had in the pantry was orzo, but I didn’t have a chance to look up orzo recipes before we left. The day before I had this great orzo side dish at a restaurant, and I sort of wanted to somewhat recreate it. But like really, HOW DOES ONE KNOW WHAT INGREDIENTS TO BUY WITHOUT CONSULTING THE INTERNET? Seriously. I tried to look up some healthy recipes with orzo on my phone, but only found a couple of the same olds that I’ve made quite a lot of times.

So, in the spirit of healthy eating I decided to get crafty and come up with my own recipe! Don’t lie, I know you’re impressed. It took some deep thinking, but I was able to come up with a few veggies to put in my shopping basket to make my very own orzo recipe. And here it is:

The Jerp’s Orzo Recipe

• Ingredients:
  • 1 cup orzo (or less if you don’t want a whole ton)
  • 1 half diced cucumber
  • 1 half diced pepper
  • 1/4 diced red onion
  • a few slices of fresh lemon
  • splash of balsamic vinegar
  • water (apparently orzo sticks together!?!)

Making my orzo recipe isn’t rocket science. Cook the orzo. When it’s done, put it in a pan with the veggies. Add the water when it starts clumping together. When everything appears cooked, pour the mixture into a bowl. Squeeze a couple of pieces of a cut-up lemon over it. Stir. Pour the splash of balsamic vinegar over it. Stir. Voila! Serve hot or cold, both taste equally awesome.

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Using Fresh Fruit to Make Low-Calorie Snacks

Mmm gotta love a healthy strawberry smoothie!

It’s summertime and there’s a plentiful amount of cheap, beautiful, fresh fruit everywhere. While this is undeniably wonderful and amazing, if you’re like me, you probably don’t really know what to do with it, besides piercing it with a stick and making fruit kabobs. Fresh fruit makes for great low-calorie snacks in its natural state, but sometimes that alone can be a bore, so you need to jazz it up a bit. If you think I’m about to suggest making a pie or some other form of fatty, non low-calorie snacks with your fresh fruit, you’ve gone nuts. Instead, think more along the lines of a strawberry smoothie (or any other kind of fresh fruit).

My boyfriend recently started using our fresh fruit to make smoothies for us at night, and they are so so good! He makes an incredible strawberry smoothie, but also commonly adds other types of fresh fruit too, including blueberries, kiwi and bananas. We both have a total sweet tooth and smoothies make for great low-calorie snacks to satisfy that craving.

Ingredients to Make a Strawberry Smoothie (or any other kind of fresh fruit):

• Fresh fruit* (obviously)
• Fat-free frozen or regular yogurt
• Milk
• Ice

Simply put these ingredients in your blender, blend, and voila you have a delicious healthy dessert! Tasty low-calorie snacks are the best as you can actually enjoy them and you don’t have to feel like a big fatty pants afterwards.

*You can also use frozen fruit, but don’t do that until wintertime when fresh fruit is super expensive.

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Looking for Easy Dessert Recipes? Try Fruit Kabobs!

Summer has finally arrived! It’s officially acceptable to prance around in shorts, tank tops, swim suits and any other clothing that leaves little to the imagination (to a degree, of course). Summertime also means barbeques, pool parties and lots of good picnic food! While there’s certainly nothing wrong with indulging in warm weather delicacies, it’s important to keep yourself in check, and making healthy desserts is a great way to do this.

Easy dessert recipes are a must in the summer, because really, who wants to be stuck in the kitchen when it’s hot and sunny outside? Not me! This past weekend my boyfriend and I had my parents over for Father’s Day dinner and I made these lovely fruit kabobs.

Easy dessert recipes don’t really get any simpler than fruit kabobs.

When it comes to healthy desserts, fruit kabobs are the best! And not just because they top the list of easy dessert recipes either. Fruit kabobs are awesome because:

• They’re fat-proof. If you only put fruit on them, they’re one of the best healthy desserts out there, as they’re guaranteed to both taste good and not add a spare tire to your midriff.
• It’s really fun to spear the fruit with a stick.
• The possibilities are endless as you can use any type and combination of fruit you wish.
• As the king of easy dessert recipes, you’d have to be a complete moron to mess them up.
• You don’t have to turn your oven on when it’s 90 degrees outside (unthinkable if you don’t have air conditioning).

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Healthy Snack Recipes: Roasted Chickpeas

Lately I’ve been venturing into my kitchen to try new healthy snack recipes so much that my oven is probably ready to go on strike. I have a one track mind, and my focus is currently set on getting in shape for my upcoming vacation. Yes, the vacation that I’m referencing is the one to San Francisco, where the average temperature in April is a nice and chilly 60 degrees. Whatever, don’t burst my idiotic bubble.

Anyways, my latest discovery is roasted chickpeas. If you’re constantly looking for healthy snack ideas like I am, you’ll thank be thanking me for this one later. These things are SO good! The best part about roasted chickpeas is that there’s like hundreds of different ways to make them — sweet, spicy, crispy, dry — you name it. If you’re craving a certain flavor, you can likely find many roasted chickpeas snack recipes to satisfy your desires.

Currently, my favorite roasted chickpeas recipe is this one, from Two Peas & Their Pod. So good! The only thing I did differently was substitute spray olive oil for canola oil, and Splenda for brown sugar (because I didn’t have any).

Mmm roasted chickpeas...

I’m not interested in making snack recipes unless they’re really, really easy. Thankfully making this roasted chickpeas recipe couldn’t possibly get much easier, which moves it even farther up the list of the best healthy snack ideas ever. Oh, and it’s also super cheap, even by my standards. A can of chickpeas costs $1.00 or less, and you can usually find the rest of the ingredients in your kitchen cabinet. Does it get any better?!

So, what’s your favorite flavor of roasted chickpeas? I’m always looking for new ways to make them, so if you’ve got a great recipe, do share!

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Easy Low Carb Breakfast Ideas

Over the past year I’ve realized that I’m a major carb monger.  I’ve always prided myself on eating healthy, but until I plugged everything I ate into the Daily Burn one day, I never particularly paid attention to the fact that I was completely over-carbing myself. Since coming upon this magic realization, I’ve traded a lot of the foods I used to eat for low-carb options. Except for breakfast.

I’m a morning robot — everyday I have plain oatmeal, mixed with low-fat peanut butter and cinnamon for breakfast. It’s amazing. So instead of looking for low-carb breakfast ideas, I simply decided to just eat less of this glorious oatmeal concoction in the morning. Less food equals less carbs, bam! Okay, this idea was brilliant until I realized that I’m starving an hour after breakfast each day, because I wasn’t eating a huge portion of oatmeal before I decided to cut back, it simply had too many carbs for my liking.

Since I refuse to get up early enough to cook a low-carb breakfast before work each day, I assumed that small amounts of oatmeal and mid-morning starvation was just how it had to be. Then I found this recipe for Clean Egg Muffins, from Blogilates. Brilliant! You can make enough of these cute little egg cupcakes on Sunday to last for the entire week. Put them in a container and carry them to work. Voila, just as easy as oatmeal, but with way less carbs!

Nothing this healthy has ever been inside a cupcake wrapper.

Mmm who knew a low-carb breakfast could be this good (or pretty)?!

Low-Carb Sides to Pair with Egg Muffins:

Eggs and toast go together like Donnie Wahlberg’s abs and baby oil, so it’s natural to pair them together, but that defeats the purpose of these low-carb egg muffins. Instead, choose one of these low-carb breakfast ideas to accompany your egg cupcakes:

• Orange
• Half a grapefruit
• Berries
• Turkey bacon
• Cottage cheese

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