Chocolate Therapy

Once in a while I bake. It doesn't happen often because the exact measuring and chemistry needed to make baking a success usually trips me up in some fashion and the end result is less than stellar. When making a tomato sauce or inventing a casserole no one's really going to suffer if you decide to add a little more milk here or a little less garlic there. But accidentally mix in too much salt or get baking powder confused with baking soda and it's goodbye dessert, hello garbage disposal.

In regular cooking I also like to switch up some lower fat or calorie ingredients to lighten the dish. I'll swap butter for margarine or use reduced fat cheeses, but it's trickier to make these switches with baking unless the recipes were written that way from that start. That's why I stick to very simple dessert recipes where small substitutions can be made with out major consequences.


I found this recipe for a Double Chocolate Cheesecake on the Kraft foods web site. Their dessert center is really neat with an iTunes-esque interface that allows you to "flip" through the recipe cards. With a few tweaks to healthify the recipe, I made a sweet treat that Matt loved. I swapped in sugar free oreos for the crust and used 1/3 Less Fat Philadelphia Cream Cheese. The texture was thick and rich, just like a real New York Cheesecake. It all held together so well, you could eat small squares of it with your fingers like a brownie or a piece of fudge. I also halved the recipe so that all the ingredients would fit into an 8" x 8" pan instead of a 9"x 13". No need for 16 full servings of cheesecake for a family of two.


I passed the link onto Mom, the real baking enthusiaist in the family, who chose the Banana Split Cake for Tuesday's Test Kitchen dessert. I'm not a huge fan of pineapple, but the banana and pudding was good. Next time go with the sprinkle of chocolate shavings on top instead of the nuts.

Everything's better with a little chocolate!