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The best way to eat cookies while on diet - Singapore Personal Trainer explains

By Jonathan Wong

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 12Oct2009 Word count: 814 Viewed: 714 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

As a personal trainer and fitness bootcamp instructor in Singapore, very often I meet people who love their cookies. Even while being absolutely committed to healthy diets designed for weight loss, fat burning and muscle building, they still long for a little dietary indulgance once in a while.

What should we do when that mood comes upon us, the mood when we feel that a cookie-less life is a life not worth living?

The answer simple: Just bake your own! That's the BEST way to eat your cookies while on a healthy diet.

Baking your own indulgent little pastries and confectionaries is far better than buying them at the store. Why?

1. VALUE - when you bake your own, you get more joy per calorie, because the fun of making them, especially if you are making them with your friends or family, the good smells that drift out of the hot oven, the feeling of warmth that comes from sharing handmade goodies, become part of your cookie experience. All this doesn't come when you buy pre-made or packaged cookies.

2. QUALITY CONTROL - when you eat home-baked cookies, you eat only cookie and nothing else. When you buy stuff in packages, your cookie, biscuits etc has stabilizers, preservatives, artficial flavors, bulking agents etc added to it, to give it a longer shelf life and to help the producers save on costs. Granted your ingredients (unless you raise and mill your own flour, harvest and roast your own cocoa beans etc) will have gone through a fair amount of chemical treatment, it would still overall have less added junk than commercial versions. Furthermore, you know for sure that your goodies are made from the best ingredients e.g: real butter instead of the cheapest commercial bakery-use, trans-fat saturated margarine.

3. ABSOLUTE FRESHNESS - you can eat them right out of the oven. Nothing gets fresher than that.

4. INCONVENIENCE - it's a fair bit more troublesome to make your own than it is to buy your own, so if you have make it a point to only eat those that you've made in your own kitchen, you'll be likely to end up eating these thingies less often.

5. AWARENESS - when you make your own cookies or muffins, you see what goes into them. Half a cup of butter. A cup of sugar. 2 cups of white flour. This makes you more aware of the depth of badness baked goods have. This encourages us to stay away more cleanly, more often.

6. CALORIE CONTROL - I'm NOT an advocator of counting calories, but when it comes to baked goods, you can play around with ingredients to cut the calorie count, e.g. less sugar, some applesauce in place of fats etc. This is tricky though, since baking is all about chemistry and your product might taste quite different (in an unpleasant way) from the "original". For low calorie baking, it's best to work with low-cal recipes that's already been tried and tested by those in the know. (My opinion is though, if you're going to indulge once a month, then just indulge!)

Baked goods are awesome. If you put one to your face, it smells like heaven, and when you put one into your mouth, it tastes like heaven. Sweet, savory, nutty, chocolate-y , crunchy, chewy, soft, crispy - whatever the taste and texture, cookies, bread, muffins, tarts and the like - they are all so addictive. My personal fav is brownies with ice cream.

Bake your own - that's the better indulgence.

Here's a recipe for some dietary excess:

The Easy Apple Crumble:

CRUST
* 1 cup quick-cooking oats (80g)
* 1 cup all-purpose flour (125g)
* 1 cup packed brown sugar (220g)
* 1/2 teaspoon baking powder (2g)
* 1/2 cup butter, melted (115g)

APPLE FILLING

* 2-3 thinly sliced apples
* Tablespoon of flour
* Squeeze of lemon juice
* 1.5 g of cinnamon
* ¾ tablespoon of vanilla
* ½ cup of sugar
* 1/3 cup of water

DIRECTIONS:

1. Place sliced apples in your baking pan, add rest of the filling ingredients over them and mix it up even with a big spoon. (adjust the amount of sugar and cinnamon as you please) Pour in the water.

2. Mix the oats, flour, brown sugar, baking powder and melted butter together in a big bowl. Make sure there are no big lumps and crumble this mixture evenly over the apples. You can double the amount of crust and put some underneath too.

3. Bake at 175C for 40-50 minutes, until the crust is a nice, crunchy golden brown.

For a peach-banana version, or a banana-peach version, you can use the following list of ingredients:

Banana-Peach version

* 1 medium banana, sliced
* 2/5 tin of peach
* 1g cardamom
* Squeeze of lemon juice
* Custard pudding (any brand from the supermarket will do)

Mix banana and peach and cardamom and lemon juice together. When the mix is in the baking pan, spoon the custard pudding over it. The custard pudding will become a nice, gooey custard sauce when baked.

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