Breakfast Oatmeal Carrot Apple Cake

We violated this cake before I knew I’d post a photo of it.

I tweaked a recipe for a (no fat, no flour, no sugar) healthy cake because had I not done so, it would have been a big, uneditable glob of gooey mess. There is no way you can make a fluffy cake with just fruit, applesauce, and oatmeal. Oatmeal will always be chewy, and not in a good way, if you transform it from cereal to cake! Moreover, cake is not good with zero sweetness. Still, I was intrigued by the recipe. Life is not always an either-or situation! Sometimes you can eat a no-compromise, full-out, high-calorie cake, and at other times you might choose to eat a little healthier. IMHO, you’ll want a real carrot cake when hosting dinner guests; to satisfy a dessert craving, or on your birthday ... and the following Oatmeal Carrot Apple Cake for a Sunday breakfast:

Breakfast Oatmeal Carrot Apple Cake

oatmeal flakes, 2 cups ground in a food processor

1 cup unbleached all-purpose flour

1/4 cup sugar

1 teaspoon baking soda

3 eggs

1 teaspoon lemon juice

1 cup applesauce

1 cup milk

2 small apples, shredded (about 1 cup)

1 cup carrots, shredded

1/2 cup walnuts

1/4 cup raisins (I add to keep a sheet cake moist for extra days.)

1 teaspoon of vanilla extract

1 teaspoon of pumpkin spice (or the equivalent of cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, cloves and allspice)

Butter to grease the baking pan.

Directions:

1) Mix all ingredients in a mixing bowl, one by one. I stirred with a fork.

2) Thickly butter a 9” by 9”  square baking pan. There’s no other fat in the cake!

3) Pour and spread the cake batter, then pop it into a preheated 350 degree F oven. Bake for about 30 minutes.

4) Remove the cake from the oven and let it cool for about 10 minutes before removing it from the pan.

Low-Fat Cream Cheese Frosting

Ingredients

4 ounces (1/2 package) cream cheese

About 2 cups (or more) of powdered sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Directions:

1) Mix and keep adding powdered sugar until you get the desired thickness.

2) Spread on top of the cake.

So what did I add to the Facebook recipe?: Flour, sugar, milk, lemon juice (your cake won’t rise without it), raisins, butter for the pan, and a low-fat cream cheese frosting. Whoever posted the original recipe did not make the cake. If they had, they wouldn’t have ended up with cake! You don’t have to be a professional baker to know it.

What motivated me to make this recipe was ... I had all the ingredients in my pantry, and a bowl of oatmeal didn't sound all that appealing. This is how my senior mom and I are eating our oatmeal this Sunday morning. A close enough 2nd to real full-fat carrot cake to be tasty. Good texture like carrot cake. Breakfast oatmeal, our way!

I’ll leave 2 links below for traditional and flakier carrot cakes to eat, not for breakfast but as dessert.🥕

You may also enjoy:

A Light Carrot Cake

A Classic 2 Layer Carrot Cake

Brownies From Scratch For My Friend’s Birthday

Swedish Cardamom Cake With Caramelized Topping

9 Tips To Curb Hunger

As we age, it gets tougher to maintain the slender bodies of our youth. I do the best I can, but with each decade of life, I have accumulated a few extra pounds. Our metabolism slows, making it easier to put on weight and harder to shed those pounds.

A woman I went to school with rides bicycles for miles and miles and miles to burn calories, and only eats one meal a day. I’ve known daily joggers, too, but I don’t have the time or desire for hours and hours and hours of exercise. Walking 20 blocks or riding a stationary bike for 30 minutes is what I can sustain.

I’ll accept the inevitability of a few extra pounds, and yet I won’t let myself go completely; therefore, I must eat less food. Moreover, I also don’t wish to rely on drugs to suppress my hunger. So how do I control my appetite?

Here’s what I do to maintain a healthy body weight by curbing hunger:

1) Eat enough protein in each meal -- 30 grams or higher.

2) Drink a cup of skim milk with dinner. It keeps me full longer. 

3) Mostly eat 3 meals a day. If not hungry for breakfast or lunch, I may skip one of them, but usually I do eat a modest breakfast and lunch, and a dinner containing a protein, a starch, and vegetables. Another friend of mine only eats 2 meals a day, but usually I need 3 meals, and a small snack at night.

4) When hunger strikes in between meals, I see if drinking hot coffee or tea with skim milk quells my hunger pangs. Lately, I’m also trying Haymaker's Punch in between meals.

5) If all else fails, I’ll eat 1 or 2 pieces of fruit -- an apple, orange, pear, or banana, which I consider free food on days I’m hungrier. A carrot, celery stalks, bites of leftover cooked butternut squash or green beans, 5 - 10 almonds or walnuts, or a few Saltine crackers sometimes work as after-dinner snacks.

I cut up fruit and top it with nuts.

6) I avoid processed food and eat real food. It tastes better and is more filling.

7) I limit how often I eat carbs per day and usually save them for dinner. Eating lots of carbs a day only whets my appetite, yet doesn’t stifle my hunger.

8) I never eat sweets mindlessly anymore. Sweets are always a planned treat, like birthday cake, Christmas cookies, or Halloween candy. Sugar isn’t healthy for anybody. Especially as we age, we must limit our intake of sugar for health and weight reasons. As it turns out, the less sugar we eat, the less we crave. Outside of planned treats, I’ll only take 2 bites of a sweet.

9) Avoid lunch clubs with overweight people. Meet for coffee, walks in the park, or to discuss books. Don’t surround yourself with folks who live to eat often at pricy restaurants, but with people who eat to live and have healthier ways of socializing. Such meals are too rich and high in calories. You’d be wasting your time and money by not indulging when restaurant-hopping. Don’t put yourself in a position where it’s a mainstay activity instead of a special occasion like a family birthday or anniversary. It also helps to have a small, contained family, in lieu of 10 siblings.😛

I wish it weren’t so, but our metabolism changes, and so must what, how much, and when we eat. It’s a shame we have to put so much thought into eating, isn’t it? Unfortunately, we do!😣 

How do you control your appetite to maintain an acceptable (if not your youthful) weight?

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The Best Sizes of Food Containers

Bormioli Rocco Quattro Stagioni Glass Milk Bottle 33.75 Ounce/1 Liter with Airtight Lid

In recent years I’ve become super orgainized. I tend to buy larger sizes of foods you might consider staples such as 4 lbs - 5 lbs of flour, sugar, dried legumes and sometimes pasta. I dislike having a job before starting a job, so having a little extra in storage containers means I can decide to make bean, lentil or pea soup without having to go to the supermarket. The same with baking, I never lack the flour or sugar to make pizza dough or a coffee cake if I get a craving or a visitor.

The 3 most useful shapes and sizes of food storage containers that fit most compactly into a pantry, refrigerator or freezer may surprise you!

1) 1 liter sized glass milk bottles - I discovered Bormili Rocco Quattro Stagioni Glass Milk Bottles with airtight lids at T.J. Maxx. Initionally, I only used them to store milk, eggnog, juice, Kombucha, i.e., liquids. But the mouth is wide enough for dried beans, peas, lentils and many pastas, and they take up less space than 32 oz canning jars, which are another great type of food storage containers. Had I considered compactness though, I’d have bought more of these than canning jars. The milk bottles are more versatile and can be lined up side by side inside a cupboard. 

2) Large (about 1 gallon) rectangle storage containers - They fit enough potato salad, cole slaw, guacamole or slices of an entire coffee cake to feed a family, but take up less room in your refrigerator or freezer than round or oval shaped contrainers. You could invest in glass or hardy plastic, but the takealong lighter plastic ones hold up surprisingly well for less moola.

3) Half cup Rubbermaid containers - When I got 8 of these as part of a set I thought it was a ripoff, but you’d be amazed at how many times they are the right size for condiments or leftovers. They also stack and snap together which is a useful space-saving function.

After I pack leftovers from a home cooked meal, I always think one day someone will design a more storeage efficient refrigerator! I notice flatter rectangles that hold a good portion of food fit better inside a refrigerator than round containers. When you get the black bottom containers or the plastic round ones for free with other food you buy, reuse them as they’re great for leftover soup or beef stew. 

Today I’d always aim to get shallow rectangle-shaped containers as the best space-savers for storage. You can stack them up!

Like-foods organized in (too thin for shoes but just right for a freezer) plastic shoe boxes bought at Walmart

If you’d like to add other space-saving-tips or brands for storing food in a cupboard, pantry, refrigerator or freezer, please comment.

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Pecans, Pudding, and Cream Cheese, Oh My!

Photo: France C - allrecipes

Called Texas Delight by some, it’s the first dessert I ever made as a child. During the summers, I made it often! My family clipped the recipe from our newspaper under a different name. Pecans, Pudding, and Cream Cheese Delight is a delicious layered dessert well worth the effort and calories:

First Layer: Make an easy pecan crust:

Ingredients:

1 cup of all-purpose flour

1 stick of soften butter

1 teaspoon cider vinegar (Vinegar is a gluten inhibitor that makes a flaky crust. Bakers call it their secret ingredient.)

1 cup of pecans - We left them whole, but feel free to break them up.

Directions for the crust, your 1st layer:

1) Mix the flour, butter and vinegar together and press the dough into a cake or square baking pan. I use a 9” by 9” pan. Press the pecans evenly into the dough.

2) Bake in a preheated 350 degrees F oven for 15 minutes. The dough will start to turn slightly brown. Remove and cool completely.

Second Layer:

Ingredients:

1 package (8 ounces) cream cheese (or Neufchàgel cheese)

3/4 cup of powered sugar

1 cup of very cold whipped cream - We no longer eat Cool Whip, the original whipped topping in the recipe. If you can find a readymade healthy whipped cream topping made from real cream or milk at your supermarket you can use it for convenience. I have a recipe below for making 3 cups of real whipped cream* you can make first and keep in the freezer while making the dessert.

Dirctions for the 2nd layer:

3. Mix the cream cheese, powdered sugar and 1 cup of whipped cream together and spread it on the cold pecan crust. Place it in the refrigerator, the colder, the better.

Third Layer:

Ingredients

2 packages of instant vanilla pudding

2 cups of cold milk

Directions for the 3rd layer:

4) Whip the dry pudding powder into the milk (a 2:2 ratio), mixing for 2 minutes. Spead the pudding over the cream cheese mixture.

Fourth Layer

Ingredients:

2 cups of very cold whipped cream

1/2 cup of chopped pecans.

Directions for the 4th layer:

5) Spread the remaining 2 cups of whipped cream as a final 4th layer over the others and garnish with a half cup of chopped pecans.

6) Chill in the refrigerator until set. We always tried to wait at least 3 hours, the colder the better the taste!

Our recipe calls for instant vanilla pudding, but I see in allrecipes, the uploader uses instant coconut cream pudding mix, which I haven’t tried. I know the vanilla pudding is delicious. Nowadays I lighten the recipe with reduced fat cream cheese and milk in the pudding. But! Don’t be fooled, there’s still plenty of calories, and yet not as many as when I made it as a child.😝🌞

🥛🍶🍴🥛🍶🥛🍶🥛🍶🥛🍶🥛🍶🥛🍶🥛🍶🥛🍶🥛🍶

*How to make 3 cups of Real Whipped Cream:

Ingredients: 

Photo: Getty

1 1/2 cups cold heavy (at least 36% fat) or whipping cream (30% - 36% fat). Either will whip into cream.

3 tablespoons sugar (granulated or powered)

1 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

Directions to make whipped cream:

1) Chill your mixing bowl and beaters in the freezer.

2) Add your heavy cream, sugar and vanilla extract. Begin mixing on a low speed and increase to medium. Mix until stiff peaks form.

Keep in the freezer while you make the dessert.

🥛🍶🍴🥛🍶🥛🍶🥛🍶🥛🍶🥛🍶🥛🍶🥛🍶🥛🍶🥛🍶

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Heath Bar Cake

Photo: Alcove

If you like English toffee, you'll love a Heath Bar Cake! This one begins with flour and leavening agent, not a box of cake mix, but it’s as easy to make as emptying a box of cake mix. This cake, made from scratch, is simple, moist and fluffy.

Heath Bar Cake 

Ingredients:

4 ounces butter

2 cups dark brown sugar
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
¼ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon of vanilla extract

2 eggs
1 cup of buttermilk
½ cup of nuts, chopped (I use walnuts or pecans.)
Either an 8 ounce bag of Heath candy bar bits or you could crush 6 - 8 health bars to get 1 1/3 cups.

Directions:

1) Using a fork, mix the first 9 ingredients together in the listed order. 

2) Spread the batter in a buttered 9’’ by 13'' cake pan, or I prefer using 2 buttered 9" round cake pans to stack them.

3) Sprinkle 1 cup of heath candy bits (or the crushed health bars) evenly over the batter. Save the rest for garnish.

4) Bake in a preheated 350 degree oven for 30 minutes, until the center is done.

If you use crushed chocolate heath bars into the batter, icing the cake may be too much of a good thing -- unless you savor rich and very sweet cake, but if you use the bag of English toffee bits, you could melt chocolate chips on top of the cake for a ganache topping, then garnish the top and sides with the remaining toffee bits. Enjoy!🎂🎈🎉🍫

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Fruit Cobbler Without The Fat

Photo: Flavor Walk

Fruit cobblers are scrumptious and scream summer is near! But, usually, these tasty cobblers are made with a stick of butter. Nowadays, I try to eat healthy about 90% of the time, so I make a cobbler recipe that only requires buttering the baking pan. You can use any fruit, such as a peeled and diced apple, or peach, or my favorite, blueberries. A combination of blueberries, seedless raspberries, and blackberries will also do. My recipe yields one or two servings, so you don't have to wait for visitors to make it. Without the usual butter in a cobbler, it's not too decadent to devour all of it by yourself. You are still eating dessert (i.e., sugar), though, so you may not want to bake the cobbler every day. But gee whiz, sometimes we just crave a little treat:😋

Fruit Cobbler Without the Fat

Ingredients: 

Fruit Filling --

1/2 cup of berries (or 1 peach or 1 apple)

1 tablespoon dark brown sugar

1 tablespoon all-purpose unbleached flour

a sprinkle of cinnamon and nutmeg

a squirt of lemon

Cobbler Streusel Topping --

2 tablespoons unbleached flour

1 tablespoon of finely crushed walnuts.

2 tablespoons dark brown sugar

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

2 - 3 tablespoons of buttermilk (or milk if it's all you have)

If you like cinnamon, you can sprinkle some in the topping.

Optional: 1 tablespoon of Quaker oats if you feel like tossing it in.

Directions:

1) In a mixing bowl, use a fork to combine all the ingredients for the fruit filling.

2) In a 2nd mixing bowl, whisk together the streusel topping ingredients.

3) Butter a baking pan or dish (an 8-inch, 9-inch, or 10-inch square baking pan, a pie pan, or a loaf pan all work). Pour in the fruit filling.

3) Spread the streusel topping evenly over the fruit filling.

4) Bake in a preheated 350°F oven for 20 - 25 minutes. Watch for the cobbler to bubble and the topping starting to turn brown. After removing it from the oven, let it cool for about 10 minutes before eating.

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What I'm Feeding My Senior Mom

Photo: Canadian Digestive Health Foundation

My Mom relies on me to make her food choices, but honestly, I liked it better when she had an appetite and all her faculties, and if she didn't eat, or eat healthily, it was her choice as an adult and not my problem. I should add that younger, she prepared and ate healthy meals. Now it's my job to plan and cook for her.

I support eating a healthy diet, and I also pity her because it's sad to grow old and lose your independence and appetite. She must follow my rules, and I can be an enforcer if necessary.:)

The following are my caregiver rules:

1) She must eat at least 2 meals a day! In her adult life, she never ate lunch, so I have to work with her lifelong habit and pack her nutritional requirements into 2 meals a day. But after I've done so ...

2) She must eat her dinner. Breakfast is never a problem. Too often she claims she's not hungry for dinner, but I tell her she must eat one. She's lucky to have someone in her life who is mean. Me! It is something a nursing home aide cannot do ... tell a senior she must eat food. In a nursing home, the meals roll in and out, eaten or not, often by separate aides.

3) She must eat the amount of protein her body requires daily and a variety of fruit, vegetables, and whole grains, as much as I can get her to eat with her reduced desire for food. I use skim milk and 4 ounces of fruit juice (no sugar added) to help meet her dietary needs. According to the National Library of Medicine, older adults may benefit from consuming 1.2 to 2.0 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight (or 0.54 to 0.9 grams per pound). This is in line with what other medical sources recommend. Three glasses of skim milk a day help get the job done! Eggs, too, are an easy-to-eat light meal.

3) No overloading on sugar. Everybody should eat a healthy diet, young, old, or in-between. Sugar is a treat, not a staple. In fact, sugar is bad for all of us and addictive. Many of us like sweets, but if a senior has arthritis, sugar causes inflammation, resulting in more painful joints. We cut down on sugar, eating it in moderation only: A row of dark chocolate, 2 cookies here and there, birthday cake, Christmas cookies, one portion of Halloween or Easter candy. So we don't feel deprived. I'm also a believer in the less sugar you consume, the less you crave it. Finally, it's as easy to like healthy food as unhealthy food. Cherries, strawberries, blueberries, peaches, and apples are all delicious snacks! Ditto for vegetables and a healthy dip such as spicy humus!!

A fortune in eggs.😳

It's payback time for both my mom and me. Once upon a time, she was the enforcer ensuring I didn't overload on sugar and ate a balanced diet, and now our roles are reversed. The egg has become the head chicken and enforcer. Be careful of the values you instill in your children. Chickens come home to roost!🐣😁

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Chocolate Cakes Without Flour or Sugar

Photo & recipe: Notycheese

Call me a skeptic. But, when you crave a slice of cake, I think you'll only satisfy your craving by eating the decadent cake. Why? The texture resulting from the flour, sugar, chocolate, and butter is why we like the dessert. Without the right texture, we have something else we are calling cake.:)

That said, all the flourless, sugarless, and butter or oil-less cakes floating around the internet are intriguing, and I'm willing to try the easy ones.

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An advantage is they often require less work with fewer ingredients than baking a 2-layer cake. Also, the amount of dessert made is usually less, so I can see using the tastier recipes as a quick snack when we lack the time or people to help us eat a whole cake. I don't see any benefit to foregoing gluten without a gluten sensitivity, but maybe it's a practical way of using the apples or bananas in our refrigerators.

Today I'll select 2 recipes for Chocolate Cake, one made with apples and the other with bananas to replace the flour, sugar, and oil or butter in the batter of traditional cakes:

Flourless Chocolate Cake Using Apples (top image👆)

Ingredients: (Half the ingredients to make less cake.)

4 medium apples, peeled and chopped into chunks
4 large eggs
5 tablespoons cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking powder

Butter or cooking oil spray to grease the baking pan

Directions: 

1) Blend the apples and eggs in a blender until smooth.

2) Add the coca powder and baking powder.

3) Pour the batter into a greased loaf pan.

4) Bake for 45 minutes or until done in the middle. Cool before slicing and eating.

🎂🥮🎂🥮🎂🥮🎂🥮🎂🥮🎂🥮🎂🥮

Flourless Chocolate Cake Using Bananas (bottom image👇)

Photo & recipe: yummyy

Ingredients for the Cake 

2 ripe bananas, sliced

2 eggs

8 tablespoons cocoa powder (I used only 1 banana, 1 egg, 1 tablespoon of cocoa powder, but tossed in a small handful of dark chocolate chips, crushed walnuts, a chopped Pure Protein bar, and a sprinkle of baking soda. After baking it, I also blended in a little vanilla Greek yogurt to get a senior to eat a banana. She liked it.)

1 teaspoon baking powder

Cooking oil spray for the dish.

Directions for the Cake:

1) Toss the bananas and eggs into a blender and mix until smooth. Transfer to a bowl and whisk in the cocoa powder and baking soda.

2) Pour into a nonstick or cooking oil-sprayed microwave-safe dish. Smooth the top with a spatula.

3) Bake in the microwave for 5 minutes. Let cool.

Ingredients for a Topping: 

1/2 cup of chocolate chips

3 - 4 tablespoons of milk

Directions:

Melt the chocolate and milk in the microwave, incorporate, and pour over the cake.

A similar recipe on my Facebook feed using oatmeal:

Feel free to try this Grand Culinary Experiment along with me. I'm also skeptical that eating flourless, sugarless, butterless cakes will help us lose weight. Still, these "cakes" could be worthy chocolate desserts in and of themselves!

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A Milk Cake

A recipe on Facebook that found me is from the page, N'oven Foods. Called a Milk Cake, it's very similar to a Buttermilk Cake. Both are sponge cakes. I'm posting the recipe because I think it solves the problem of too much cake without enough visitors to eat it!

The only cakes worth the calories are either homemade from scratch, or made by a good bakery, not from a box of cake mix, but sometimes a 2-layer cake is too much of a good thing. The following recipe is for a 6-inch single-layer homemade cake ... and you can either bake it in an oven or on a stovetop!

Milk Cake by N'oven

Ingredients:

2 tablespoons butter

1/2 cup milk (Bump it up to condensed, half and half, or cream if you wish.)

2 large eggs

1/2 cup sugar (I use 1/4 cup sugar.)

1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 cup all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon of baking powder

I add a tiny pinch of salt

Directions:

1) Mix the butter and milk in a saucepan. Bring it to a boil and set aside.

2) In a mixing bowl, crack 2 eggs and using an electric mixer blend for one minute.

3) Add 1/2 cup of sugar and continue mixing until foamy.

4) Next use a strainer to shift in the flour, baking powder, and salt. Pour in the vanilla extract. Continue mixing either with an electric mixer, a whisk, or even a spatula. 

5) Into the bowl, incorporate the hot milk and butter with the dry ingredients and continue mixing.

6) Pour the batter into a well-greased 6" baking pan, The video places the pan on top of a metal trivet inside a bigger pot with a lid to cook on a stovetop for 30 minutes. I'll bake mine inside the oven at 350 degrees F for 30 minutes. But if we're ever somewhere (camping?) without a stove, there's an alternate way of "baking" it!

A-ha, the original cooking method on a stovetop explains why this cake is 6" and one layer. I bet you could make the cake without using 2 pans and a metal trivet by simply pouring the batter into a buttered cast iron skillet covered with a lid. Cast iron skillets get very hot and cook evenly on a stovetop or inside an oven. I think since cornbread can either be baked in an oven or cooked in a skillet on a stovetop, the same would work with a Milk Cake. Like pancakes, only slower and higher.

The recipe ended here on Facebook, but not in Debra's kitchen where dark chocolate and a little bit of milk get melted in a microwave and then poured over the finished and cooled Milk Cake. A  ganache topping is France's contribution to the desert world.:)

Clearly, a Milk Cake is editable plain; sprinkled with powdered sugar; or frosted. Icing with shredded nuts, or chocolate sprinkles would work too. You do you!

I've made cakes when a friend was coming over for coffee. My friend eats a slice and I eat a slice and then I have the rest of the cake I no longer want that ends up in the freezer.

This delicious recipe is a coffee hour or tea time keeper! It solves 2 problems: no oven (but you can bake it in the oven) and unwanted leftover cake. Sometimes all we crave is a single day of cake.

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