Chocolate Cupcakes with Vanilla Pudding Filling and Chocolate Frosting (low calorie!)

Happy Father’s Day!

My dad is a huge fan of cream-based desserts. He loves all of those creamy fattening desserts such as eclairs, but is a sucker for Wuzetka, which is a Polish cake that has chocolate cake layers on top and bottom and in the middle it’s a very thick cream. He always buys that cake when they go grocery shopping in Polish deli stores. My mom hatess it. The cake is so fattening and it doesn’t really even taste all that good when it’s made in a store anyway. The way we remember it, from Poland, was much much better. Especially when it’s homemade.

Well I totally went off track. I’m not even making this cake for Father’s day. I don’t think my culinary experience is high enough to tackle this just yet. One day though, I might. A healthier version, of course. So for today, the cupcakes I made (of course it’s cupcakes, of course, haha) were inspired by Wuzetka.

It’s a deep chocolate cupcake with a homemade vanilla pudding filling and a chocolate frosting. While this dessert looks and tastes completely sinful, it really isn’t! Healthy chocolate frosting tastes just as good as the butter laden one, if not better, and it definitely makes you feel better about eating it guitlessly. The delicious creamy pudding filling is a wonderful contrast to the deep chocolatey cupcake. The outcome is simply wonderful.

Not one person could tell this cupcake had such incredible stats. A cupcake that has 4g of sugar? And only 120 calories for such an amazingly sinful-tasting treat! How’s that for “indulge without the bulge”?!

Now this is my take on a cream dessert – make cupcakes, and make them healthy 🙂

Chocolate PB Protein Pudding

I randomly made this. I didn’t realy know what to expect out of it but oh man, I have been addicted to this creation ever since. It works especially well with the chocolate zucchini protein mini muffins I made a while back (yeah, I’m only now finishing them – the beauty of baking and cooking for one person).

I don’t usually like eating muffins or anything alone. I felt like these muffins definitely needed something on the side. I ate it with plain yogurt a few times but I ran out of yogurt and purchased organic kefir recently so I thought I would use that.

The consistency of kefir by itself is pretty liquidy and it was too liquidy for me to use as a dip for the muffins. So I thought I should thicken it up. Plus, since I always get the plain flavored ones, flavoring it up wouldn’t be a bad idea either.

Out came this addicting delicious pudding. Packed with protein. So good!

Chocolate Chia Pudding + SweetLeaf Stevia

Today I am sharing something that tastes so indulgent but is actually really good for you. Don’t you love those treats? They are just the best. I sometimes get random night cravings – they suck. I’ll eat perfectly well all day but then as soon as night hits, I get cravings. It might be partially because I start getting bored – and food thoughts creep into my mind. So sometimes I ignore them successfully. However, sometimes they are so loud, I am unable to. I must satisfy that darn craving. Chocolate.

So why not satisfy it guit-free? Chocolate pudding. You could make the Chocolate Pudding with avocado. That one is delicious… but you don’t always have avocado on hand. So then you could make something else – chocolate chia pudding. Chia has wonderful properties which soak up the liquid they are in, making it into a gel/pudding consistency. This one was simply perfect.

Plus it was perfect for the new Chocolate SweetLeaf Stevia liquid drops I got in the mail recently. Good way to try them out, they were the perfect addition to this recipe. By the way, I was pretty excited when I got this in the mail – I got both the chocolate and root beer flavors. I’m psyched for the chocolate – it gives the perfect chocolatey flavor with sweetness of stevia. I’m totally sold on liquid stevia products by SweetLeaf – they don’t leave a weird aftertaste and taste delicious.

What I Ate Wednesdays #3: Vegan

This week is the week of my vegan challenge. Started on Monday, therefore I thought it would be a good idea to record WIAW for the first day of being vegan: Monday. Surprisingly, the day easily went by. It wasn’t exactly challenging, or not as challenging as I though it would be. I just have to be more conscious of what I am putting in my body which is a great behavior that I wouldn’t mind as becoming a habit.. we should all be aware of what we put in our bodies: what ingredients are in different things, etc. This is already proving to be an eye-opening and informational experience and I am excited to be moving forward.