Baking Mad Monday - Chocolate Brownies

It's Sarah V's  turn to take part in the Baking Mad low calorie baking challenge this week! 

I haven't had much free time lately. Well, ANY. But I managed to grab half an hour yesterday to put these brownies together. It was a good thing as they were super quick and easy to make, and only used one bowl!

As Sarah said last week, the point of the Baking Mad challenge is to make lower calorie treats with Half Spoon granulated sugar by Silver Spoon. Baking Mad provided me with some products to use:

In addition I had to supply baking powder, low fat margarine and an egg.

I chose the brownies as I LOVE chocolate. I was quite interested to try them as my favourite brownie recipe is incredibly decadent, with a whole block of butter in it - these are a lot better for you!

Low Calorie Brownies

Ingredients
70g Margarine (low fat)
25g Good quality orange 70% dark chocolate, broken up
1 Happy Eggs lightly beaten
0.50 tsp Pure Vanilla Extract Blend (Nielsen-Massey)
60g Half Spoon Granulated Sugar (Silver Spoon)
25g Plain White Flour (Allinson Nature Friendly) sifted*
1 tsp Cocoa Powder
0.50 tsp Baking Powder

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C/fan160°C/ 350°F gas 4.
2. Grease and base line a 14cm square tin.
3. Put the chocolate and low fat margarine in a large bowl over a pan of just-simmering water, making sure the bowl doesn’t touch the water. Stir until the chocolate has melted, remove from the heat and stir until smooth.
4. Add the other ingredients to the bowl and mix well. Spoon into the tin, levelling the surface with the back of a spoon. Bake for 25 minutes or until risen and firm around the edges but a little soft in the centre. Cool in the tin for 15 minutes. The brownie will continue to cook as it cools.

Although the recipe stated plain flour, I'd actually been sent Self Raising. Based on the small quantity, I tried it with Self Raising and it was fine. I think the brownies needed a raising agent to bulk them out a bit.

The brownies were yummy! Very light, and a bit more cakey than full fat brownies, but still chewy in the middle and lovely and chocolatey. The orange chocolate added a nice touch. I took them to work today and no one realised they were low fat!

Yummy!

Sunday Summary #44

Another week already, phew! How are you all getting on with your goals? We'd love to hear!

Gemma - Bit of a disaster this week, I put 1lb on when I weighed in class on Tuesday. I had a bad weekend before and I couldn't reverse the damage in one day. I have weighed at home this morning and I have lost this lb and a little more so I'm not too disappointed. I have stayed within my points this week but I have used a lot of them for coffees and treats rather than food and this is not a trend I want to see continue. I will put it down to the cold weather this week and try and snack on more healthy food next week and have more filling meals.

Charlene - Feeling really un-motivated with my Jenny Craig diet now, I'm almost finished though. I'm trying hard to stick to it but I'm getting bored of the same foods. I spoke to someone else who is doing the diet and they've got a different food for every day of their 2 week trial, whereas I only have 7 different main meals so it's the same things every week. I upped my hours at work so I'm now doing 12hr shifts and having to take breakfast, lunch AND dinner into work with me. Does anyone have any healthy ideas except from soup? I have access to a microwave.

Sarah V - I lost 1.5lbs at weigh-in this week, but have seriously fallen off the wagon since then. A combination of celebrating my best friend's engagement and a ridiculously busy and stressful week at work has lured me off the healthy path and towards alcohol and naughty food! I'm going to try and get back on it this week, although like Charlene I am struggling with Jenny Craig, it's only Week 2 but I'm getting bored already! Just got to try and stick to it, I guess!

Lucy - Had a bit of a nightmare this week, if you read my blog or Twitter you'll know I'm in London for two weeks. My accommodation didn't work out as planned so I am now in a house-share with at least five other people and the kitchen is disgusting and the fridge is mouldy, thus meaning I don't want to buy things that need refrigerating or use many pots and pans, so I am having to spend a small fortune on meals for one every night. Certainly not the most ideal of situations but not a lot can be done unfortunately. I am starting my Maxitone diet not this week but next, so hopefully we'll start to get back on track then!

Sarah - I have been struggling to get back on track since the honeymoon :( I am just not in the right place at the moment for Slimming World.  I love the diet and I know it works but you have to want that more than you want cake and at this moment in time cake is winning hands down each time... So, I still want to lose weight (23lbs or so more please) so I have decided to give Weight Watchers a go for a month or so and see how I get on with it.  I have joined Weight Watchers online via Quidco (thanks to Mrs Sock!) and will get £30 cash back meaning 3 months membership will only cost me £2.85, a bargain hey!  If any of you are thinking of doing the same thing let me know and I will send you a referral email :)  I am now on day 4 of WW and am constantly hungry even though I am eating loads of fruit and veg and am hoping that my body gets used to 26 points worth of food quickly!

Guest Post - Sally MyFitnessPal

I've never exactly been a small person, I've always been somewhere between a size 12-16 since I was about 16 years old. And only recently I've found my weight increase for a number of reasons (got a new job which means I can afford tasty food AND share it all with my lovely man!) So before Christmas I knew that I needed to shift a bit of weight because I eat like a HORSE at Christmas (don't we all though?) and I wanted to join the post-Christmas dieters in the new year. So I looked into a few ways of losing weight. There were two problems with me doing this:


1) I LOVE food. I really bloody love food. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, afternoon tea, elevensies. Really offer me some food and I'll take it. I LOVE FOOD.


2) I'm SO lazy. I love nothing more than having alone time with my laptop or watching movies with my man or even when I feel productive and do some drawing it's not exactly like I'm being active. These past times do not aid me in any way for weight loss.


Upon further research into ways to aid weight loss I heard of a little app for the iPhone called "myfitnesspal" and boy, is it good.

It's basically an app that calorie counts. I've read/heard lots of things that make this sound like a bad thing, for example Pauline Quirke on the new Lighter Life advert, but really this app makes it so incredibly easy.

You put in your starting weight, and where you want to get to. It gives you the option of how many lbs a week you want to lose (as a guide-I think it's pretty impossible to lose 2lbs a week every week) and then tells you your new calorie goal for the day.


The point of the app is not to discourage you from eating (oh no, I got told off by it one day for NOT EATING ENOUGH CALORIES - it literally shouted at me) but to encourage you to work off the calories. It's good that it's all there in red and green for you as it's so incredibly simple.


So you basically tell it everything you eat throughout the day, and it has a MASSIVE database of food, I have always found everything I've eaten on there. And what's helpful is that it has a super good barcode scanner so that you can just scan what you've eaten and it'll load it in automatically. You have to work out the weight and portions of bits you've eaten to get the calories but really, the maths isn't that hard.

The same goes for any exercise you do. It has two categories, cardio and strength. I'm not really one for strength-induced workouts so I usually just put in the cardio. As I said I'm really lazy so I put in any sort of exercise that I do throughout the day:

Walking the dog
Walking in general (we don't have a car at the moment-boo)
Hula-hooping
Cleaning (it doesn't burn a lot but it counts!)
Zumba class


Daniel and I treated ourselves to an Xbox with Kinect for Christmas and got ourselves a few dancing games including Zumba and Just Dance 3. Just 20 minutes on Just Dance 3 burns about 100 calories! That's worth about 10 peanut butter m&ms :)


I even cheekily added "standing - playing guitar" once after we rocked out at an Adam Ant concert for a few hours. That burnt a lot of calories!

The last great thing about this app is the progress you make can be seen on a little graph. You just have to remember to weigh and measure yourself regularly and put it in. Seeing the little graph drop gradually is very encouraging!

So I did this for a month before Christmas and lost a total of 1.3kg. I went from 79.9kg (12.6 stone) to 78.6kg (12.3 stone). My target calories for each day was 1270 - so I could eat what I wanted as long as I burnt it off.

I took a break over Christmas because -let's face it- it's impossible to diet over the festive season. So. Many. Good. Thiiiiiings. But I started again on January 2nd and I didn't dare weigh myself over Christmas so waited until the weekend after and was pleased to see I'd lost a bit more! 

I've gone down to 1200 calories a day and am currently at 77.5kg (12.2 stone) and have lost 2.4kg in total!! Having the Kinect has made it much easier to find fun things to do to burn off some calories, and best of all it's in the comfort of my own home with only my puppy dog watching me :)


So that's where I'm at right now, so far so good! A few of my friends use the app too so we can see how each other is doing and send each other little messages of encouragement! If you don't have an iPhone then you can use the website www.myfitnesspal.com and I believe it's now available for lots of other types of phones too!

My own personal aim is to get down to a healthy weight. It's not about looks for me, just feeling healthy - I have far too many dresses that I couldn't bear to part with if I lost too much weight!!

Happy exercising!

Sally xx

Diet Friendly Restaurants - Tibits, London.

There are few phrases that strike fear into the heart of someone in their first week of a diet than 'Let's grab a bite to eat!' Let's face it, the majority of eateries out there are calorific. Or, the only low fat option is a plate of leaves and a little bit of meat, which doesn't do a great job of soaking up half a bottle of white wine.

I asked on Twitter for recommendations for somewhere healthyish to go in London last weekend with a friend, and Harriet suggested Tibits, off Regent Street. It was an EXCELLENT suggestion.

Tibits is, essentially, a big salad bar. There's a huge selection of dishes - all vegetarian - mostly cold, but some hot, and most of it is really healthy, too (I must confess a couple of beer battered onion rings found their way onto my plate). It's measured by weight, so you take what you fancy from the buffet and then take your plate to get weighed and pay. If you want to try a bit of everything, you're looking at around £10-15 a plate, but you can take as little or as much as you want. Here's my plate:





The selection is huge - but my favourites were the butternut squash, green beans, the quinoa and the falafel. Oooh, and the red pepper houmous. And the goats cheese foccacia! My companion also said the curry was excellent.

I can't recommend it enough - it's so rare to find something healthy, filling and yummy and Tibits was all of those things. It's also fast and - crucially for a buffet - fresh, with the dishes replaced regularly, which so many places don't bother with! If you're in London for the day, I highly recommend. They also do takeaway - if I worked nearby I think I'd be in there every lunchtime!

I'm thinking of making Diet Friendly Restaurants a regular feature - I have a few in mind but if you can think of any please do make recommendations in the comments!