Paleo Low Calorie Apple Pie Microwave Mug Muffin!

Now this is the story all about how my pancakes turned just barely brown, so I'd like to take a minute just sit right there, and I'd like to tell you how I made a goddamn apple pie-flavored mug muffin in your microwave.

I had something going there...

So the odds are you've at least once stumbled across one of the many recipes for cakes and other baked goods you can make in the microwave, be them online, in magazines, or anywhere else. Cakes are tasty, and I certainly can't argue with that, but they're usually not very healthy. Sure, you might occasionally stumble across a nice low-calorie recipe, perhaps one that uses artificial sweetener or produces a serving size that barely constitutes a spoonful. Disappointing, no?

Yes. But be disappointed no more! As you've probably already seen with quite some profusion, I've made a hobby out of finding ways to make food that are tasty and healthy, and I dare say I've done it again, and all thanks to some failed flapjacks.

So the other day, I had some extra time in the morning, and decided I'd try to make some pancakes. If you've learned anything about me from this blog, it's probably that I make pretty much everything out of cabbage. This recipe involved some cabbage, an egg white, 2/3 cups applesauce, a little yogurt, spices, and baking powder. While the final product tasted great, it didn't really stay together in pancakes; it kind of just formed a crumble of sorts. An amorphous mass of breakfast on a plate. As I sat there, eating my breakfast mass, I thought the texture kind of reminded me of these mug cakes.

The next morning, I figured I'd put that to the test. I basically whipped up another batch of pancake batter, but halved every ingredient except for the egg white. Once all was well and mixed together, I put it in a mug and nuked the whole thing on high for 90 seconds. Well, 90 seconds wasn't quite enough, so I put it back in a couple times, each time for 30 more seconds, until it seemed more or less well cooked and set. I topped it with a little whipped cream(OK, not the healthiest thing, but it's like 90% air), and dug in. I'll try to put this simply.

It. Was. Amazing. It really had a cake-like texture and a sweet apple-cinnamon taste. The whole thing was a decent size and only totalled around 100 calories. Even though cabbage provided most of its bulk, it didn't make the cake taste like cabbage. Honestly, I don't think you'll believe me regarding how great this turns out until you try it, and I recommend you do so right away.

This recipe makes an apple pie flavored cake, with the taste of apple and cinnamon imparted to the recipe. The thing is, pretty much any flavor ideas can be used. Mashed banana with chocolate or plum and spice, the possibilities seem endless! And as with so many of the recipes on here, it would take minimal adjustments to make this recipe on Passover if you observe the holiday.

Apple Pie Muffin Microwave Mug Recipe

Serves: 1

Calories per serving: 100

Ingredients:

• ~1/8 medium-large head cabbage(I think around 1/2 cup riced)
• 3-6 tbsp unsweetened applesauce
• 1 tbsp yogurt(Greek works well)(optional)
• Ground cinnamon
• Ground nutmeg
• 1 large-extra large egg white
• Drop of vanilla extract
• Pinch baking powder

Instructions:

1. Rice the cabbage. Add 3 tbsp applesauce to food processor and process further. Continue adding applesauce by the spoonfull until the mixture blends fairly smoothly. If you want to add yogurt, add before adding additional applesauce.
2. Crack an egg and separate the white into a microwave-safe mug(do what you want with the yolk). Beat lightly with a fork. Add the cabbage mixture to the mug and mix the egg white in well.
3. Add a drop of vanilla, as well as cinnamon and nutmeg as desired. Add the baking powder and mix well.
4. Microwave on high for 1:30 - 2:00 and check for doneness. You can poke with a fork or toothpick to see if it is done on the inside. Put back in the microwave for 30 - 45 seconds at a time until done.
5. Either remove from mug onto a plate or eat straight from the cup.

Troubleshooting:

I've made this recipe, and different variations of it, very many times. In doing so, I've found some problems that you may come across. The main one results from having a batter that's too wet, has too much baking powder, or too little egg white. Basically, when this happens, your cake won't set as a cake very well, and can very likely bubble over the mug you put it in. If this happens, don't fret, for all hope is not lost! Spoon the mixture to a larger microwave-safe bowl or container and give it around 5:00 on high. You'll end up with more of a sort of bread pudding than a cake, but it will still be a tasty and healthy breakfast/dessert treat.



Hey there. Still reading this? O.K., I don't want to say too much, since I don't know when I'll actually have a fully fledged blog post and recipe ready to publish on it, but I would just like to tell you that I made a very special breakfast for myself this morning, and will be sharing it with all of you sometime before Passover rolls around. Until then, happy cabbaging!

Grain-Free Apple-Spice Cake Recipe with Veggies

Now this is a recipe that I've been looking forward to for quite a while. Even before I finally got around to trying out the cooking process, I'd had it sitting on my "queue" of recipes-to-do for a bit, and after I eventually made it, it took me a while to get around to writing this. So what special treat do I bear this time? Would you believe me if I told you it was a soft and moist cake that tasted like and apples and cinnamon but had a vegetable as its main ingredient?

Unless you're new here, the answer to that question should have been a resounding "YES!" So what's this about finally getting to the recipe? Well, for a few days, I was essentially trying at least one or two new cabbage recipes out each day, some being so simple I don't think I should even post them here, and others will certainly get posts of their own up some time in the not-too-distant future. When it finally came time for me to try making this neat little cake, it ended up becoming quite a hectic night in my household. Firstly, my little sister happened to have invited over one of her friends from school to spend the night, meaning there were not one, but two loud little creatures running around for much of the night. In addition, I couldn't actually start cooking until pretty late at night, and didn't get done until a little past midnight, now let's see if the results were worth it.

The cake tastes great, I can tell you that much. Yes, of course cabbage is that vegetable I was talking about earlier, but the cake does not taste like cabbage. It tastes just mildly sweet and pleasantly flavored by the unsweetened applesauce and spices included for just that purpose. The technique I followed to make the cake was sort of like some sort of bastardized sponge cake recipe, starting with beating egg whites until peaks begin to form, but then adding fairly wet and dense ingredients to it, so the final result was still fluffy, but it was more thick and shortcake-y than you'd expect from a "legitimate" sponge cake.

My phone actually died right after taking this picture of the egg whites.

Topped with a little bit of whipped cream or some more unsweetened applesauce, you end up with a deliciously healthy option for dessert. Just note that I recommend baking in a tube pan, as the center of this cake is going to take longer than the edges to cook. And if you have any desire, the recipe's always here for Passover, too, which is coming up.

Grain-Free Apple-Spice Cake Recipe

Serves: 6

Calories per Serving: ~40

Ingredients:

• 3 extra large egg whites(or equivalent amount)
• ~1/4 medium-large head green cabbage
• 1 cup unsweetened applesauce
• Pinch of salt
• ~1/2 tsp vanilla extract
• Spices as desired(I used cinnamon and nutmeg)
• ~1/4 tsp baking powder

Instructions:

1. Preheat oven to 375° F. Crack egg whites into a bowl with plenty of room to accommodate them. Beat with an electric mixer until peaks begin to form.
2. Rice your cabbage in a food processor and fold gently into the egg whites.
3. Gently fold all other ingredients into egg whites.
4. Spray pan with cooking spray and lightly coat with flour or starch(optional, but helpful). Pour batter into your pan of choice and roughly even out the top. A tube pan is recommended.
5. Bake for 50 minutes, then leave in oven after turning off heat with the door slightly open for five minutes.

Healthy Fudge Brownies? Try Vegetables for Dessert

Well it's Sunday. I apologize for getting this out so late in the day, it's been an unexpectedly busy one. But hey, I came through in the end, right? Yeah...

Not long ago, I set out to find how to make desserts out of vegetables, cabbage in particular, and already came up with a recipe for some moist cocoa-cabbage cakes. I've still been experimenting, and I've found one other version of a chocolate cabbage dessert recipe that I'll need to perfect and present. This one seems to have come out more dense and fudgy, and perhaps closer to a brownie than my original recipe(which was intended to be a brownie)

Remember me?

The main source of calories in my cake recipe was, without a huge surprise, the sweetener: maple syrup. In this recipe, I set out to use a lower-calorie sweetener, and since there's no erythritol, stevia, thaumatin, etc., in the house, I opted for a more subtle provider of sweetness: fruit! In this case, I used a plum, which I first pureed. I figured the fruit puree could also act as a pseudo-butter for the brownies. I wouldn't want to lower the intensity of the sweetness in order to cut calories only to reintroduce at least that many with fat!

Now, as always, I rice up some cabbage in the same food processor. Also in keeping with my "norms", I experiment with 1/4 head of cabbage, which gives me about 1 cup of "rice." Now is where I deviate from my last attempt by putting the cabbage rice in the microwave for 1 minute on high. This essentially steams the cabbage and will make it possible to wring out some of its liquid, which I then do by placing it all in a paper towel and just wringing it out.

Careful! It'll be hot! I'm trying to get rid of some(but not all) of the water in the cabbage because it will basically be introduced by the plum, and I don't want the batter to be too wet. If I'd wring out too much, though, the cabbage would become hard to mix and would reduce to very little volume. The next deviation came in the form of the dairy. I still added dairy, but this time, instead of using milk, I used low-fat greek yogurt, and less of it than I did of milk. I did this figuring the yogurt would provide a sort of density to the dessert, and I think it did this pretty well, actually.

Then I add the egg white - one - to bind the recipe. Then all that's left is to add flavor, which came in the form of three tablespoons of cocoa powder and a drop of vanilla. I also do one more little thing in the hopes of aiding the baking process: I refrigerate the batter for around an hour before baking. Honestly, I have no idea if this truly made a difference to the end result, but oh well. Also, this recipe lacks baking powder, unlike my earlier cake recipe.

An hour later(roughly), after a quick spritz of cooking spray, I pour the batter into two mini-loaf foil tin things and put in the oven at 375°, where they end up staying for around 45 minutes. I could have taken them out at 40 minutes, I think, but I got a little preoccupied and had to finish dealing with something else. Anyway... after getting the two sheets out of the tins, I cut them into smaller slices and freeze on a plate to help them hold.

Close up of a single tin pre-baking

Now did you ever think there would be "healthy fudge brownies" that really were healthy and fudgy?

Healthy Fudge-Brownie Recipe:

Serves: 8

Calories Per Serving: 20(with nonfat yogurt)

Ingredients:

• ~1/4 small-medium head green cabbage
• 3 tablespoons greek yogurt
• 1 plum
• 3 tablespoons cocoa powder
• 1 large egg white

Instructions:

1. Preheat oven to 375° F. Wash plum and cut into eight pieces. Place in food processor with about a tablespoons of water and puree. Remove from food processor.
2. Slice the cabbage and pulse in food processor until a rice consistency is attained. Add yogurt one tablespoon at a time and pulse in between. Remove from food processor and add pureed plum.
3. Crack 1 egg and add the white to the batter; mix well.
4. Let batter sit in refrigerator for approximately one hour.
5. Spray a small loaf tin or cake pan with cooking oil and pour in mixture. Bake in oven for ~40-45 minutes.
6. After baking, remove fudge from pan and cut into approximately eight slices. Place on a plate or other container in the freezer for a few hours to overnight.
7. Remove from freezer and let thaw. Serve cold or warm in microwave and serve warm.

In the end, these cabbage treats were pretty tasty. They're certainly not as sweet as the last method I tried, which called for maple syrup, and the plum gives them a bit of a tang, assisted by the yogurt. These "brownies" are fudgier than the "cakes" were, and I think they needed to be let sit in the fridge and/or freezer for a little while before they were really able to hold together very well. Eaten chilled I could describe them as "mousse bars", and warmed they're a sort of fudgy brownie. Either way, they're delicious. And of course, they'd be a great dessert to make over Passover.

Cutting Calories with Cocoa Cabbage Cake

If it's all the same, I think I'll be posting more likely on Sundays from now on, rather than Tuesdays. And for this Sunday, I have something special:

"Cabbage Cake"? Whaa!?!?

OK, so maybe you think I'm crazy, and I just might be, but I have a reason to my madness. I've been messing around with a lot of different recipes, as is the reason for this blog's existence, and as you may have guessed by the name "Caped Cruciferous", a lot of these recipes are cabbage-based. After poking around the Internet and uncovering a plethora of cauliflower-based dessert recipes, I figured it should be possible to make some out of cabbage instead, so I set out to experiment. The first thing I wanted to make: some sort of cake or brownie.

Cabbage "rice"

Once upon a time, not so long ago, I was a huge food junkie, practically devouring anything I considered "okay" within an arm's reach. More recently, I've been limiting my intake of food much more and have turned away from junk food for the most part. I've seen claims made online that you cease to crave junk food once you stop eating it; false! I mean no exaggeration when I say I found myself literally just staring at picture of brownies online in a way that might get recipe website tagged NSFW. Worried that I might give in before long if I don't find some way of handling these cravings, I knew what the one thing I truly needed was: cabbage brownies.

Creamy mashed cabbage?

This is what I set out to make. Starting with 1/4 of a head of green cabbage, I "riced" it in a food processor, added some milk, and continued to puree it, eventually turning it into mashed potato consistency. An egg white served as a binding agent, as this is usually what I use, and I flavored it with vanilla, cocoa powder, peanut powder, and maple syrup.

Once my batter was finished with the addition of baking powder, I needed something to bake it in. The oven was already preheated, and I was kinda having trouble finding a good container. I had planned to use a cake pan or something of that nature, but realized that I didn't have enough batter to fill it to any real meaningful depth. Eventually I decided on a foil muffin tin, and was able to fill five cups with a bit of batter, they were in the oven.

I had actually only expected the cakes to need between 20 and 30 minutes at 375°, I sure was wrong. I kept checking them by sticking in a toothpick every five minutes or so past the 20 minute mark, and didn't really feel content with how they were turning out until around 45 minutes had passed! But in the end...

Delicious - and healthy - cabbage cake! And yes, it really is tasty. It's definitely sweet, and may even need less maple syrup than I used. It tastes chocolatey and, well, cakey, but not really cabbage-y. Nutrition-wise, these guys seem like a win-win, all in all. Everything added together within the ingredients contributes less than 60 calories for each cake! This number would drop even lower if I'd made some modifications, like using less milk(since it was a very wet batter) or a sweetener other than maple syrup. I could also cut down by using flavors other than chocolate and peanut that don't contribute calories, like cinnamon or other spices.

Cocoa Cabbage Cake Recipe:

Servings: 5

Calories Per Serving: 55(with 2% milk)

Ingredients:

• ~1/4 small-medium head green cabbage
• 1 large egg white
• 7 tbsp milk
• 1 tbsp cocoa powder
• 1 tbsp low fat peanut powder
• 2 tbsp maple syrup
• Drop vanilla extract
• Pinch of salt
• Pinch of baking powder

Instructions:

1. Preheat oven to 375° F. Slice cabbage and pulse in a food processor until a rice consistency is reached.
2. Add milk 1 tablespoon at a time, pulsing in between, until the batter reaches a creamy texture.
3. Move from food processor into bowl. Crack an egg and separate out the white; mix only the white into the batter.
4. Add the rest of the ingredients and mix well.
5. Spray a muffin tin with cooking spray, and fill five cells with the batter. Bake in oven for ~45 minutes.

I spread a little bit of reduced fat greek yogurt with cocoa powder on top of mine. Just an idea. I'll be tweaking the recipe a lot in order to try to perfect the art of making dessert out of vegetables. The texture of these cakes was certainly pleasant, and I'd best describe it as "moist and loose". The texture, I say at the risk of making it sound slightly less appealing, almost seems reminiscent of meatloaf. I think if I cut down the liquid and replace some or all of the milk with yogurt, and omit the baking powder, I could make it more brownie-like. I could also make the cake more fluffy, I'd imagine, by beating the egg white almost into a meringue and folding it in; I'll be trying both of these eventually, and I'll be sure to let you know how it turns out.
But in the meantime, we actually have a sweet and healthy chocolate cake to munch on - guilt free!

One more thing: Passover's coming up in not too long, and it wouldn't be very hard at all to make this recipe completely Kosher for Passover, just keep the vanilla and baking powder in mind.

Starting the day with a sweet, healthy breakfast - GAIA OATS

How do you know your day has begun? Maybe you go for a walk, listen to some music, do some yoga. Whatever you do, it's part of a routine. My routine starts with a quick workout, shortly followed by my breakfast. After a bit of experimenting, I think I've come up with a good routine, and that routine is rounded off with a great breakfast. I have no shame in admitting that I eat the same breakfast almost every morning, and I don't regret it one bit. What I eat is filling. It's tasty. It's warm. It's hearty. But what is this wonderful breakfast I speak of?

You can come up with your own name for it, but I call these "Gaia Oats". I'm talking about a tasty oatmeal dish with strong flavor, big volume, and small calories. So what goes into it? Let's start with the obvious:

Oatmeal. Starting preparations the night before, one serving of rolled oats serves as the base of the meal. But oats by themselves are pretty boring, aren't they. You know what isn't boring? Chocolate. About 1 1/2 tablespoons of cocoa powder, to be specific. To counter the natural bitterness of unsweetened cocoa powder, we'll need something sweet. But what's sweet but not too high-calorie? Fruits are, and plums are a prime candidate.

With only around 30 calories each, processing or blending one piece of fruit with a little water into a sauce to cook into our oatmeal will give us the sweetness we need, and also account for around
1/2 cup of the liquid we'll need.

Mix in one egg white and about enough water to make the liquid have a volume of about 1 2/3 cups, excluding the egg white. Add in a dash of vanilla extract, and add the wet ingredients to the dry.

Mix well, and get ready to microwave it. It's gonna go in for five minutes on high. Once it's done, take it out, give it a minute or two to cool a little, and mix in about 1/2 cup more water. Return to the microwave for about 2:30, or until the oats start convexing.

Whenever you add water to this, you'll want to judge what you have based on the consistency. I find that it's good for it, at this point, to have a consistency like that of a thin jelly. Once you're done, put your oats into something to hold them and refrigerate them overnight.

If you can't do it overnight, try to give it at least 2 hours or so; that's usually enough. In the morning, put your oats into a microwave safe bowl. Mine took a gelatin like consistency... amost. That's normal, just use a spoon or something to mix it up a bit.

Now you're gonna return it to the microwave for around five minutes. Let's see what we ended up with.

Look at that! That bowl is full to the brim, and there's still a little left over, too! Here's another angle for perspective's sake:

Have fun with these giant, tasty oats! They taste like chocolate, with a touch of sweetness and just a little tang from the plum. Enjoy!

Gaia Oats Recipe:

Serves: 1

Calories per serving: ~210

Ingredients:

1/2 cup rolled oats 1 1/2 tbsp. cocoa powder 1 plum 1 large egg white Pinch of salt Vanilla extract Water Instructions:

Mix oats, cocoa powder, and salt in a microwave-safe bowl or container. Cut plum into eighths, removing the pit. Prepare into a sauce by processing in a food processor or blender with a little bit of water. Add more water to the plum sauce until its total volume is about 1 1/2 cups, or slightly less for a thicker cereal. Crack the egg and separate out the white, mixing it into the plum sauce, then add the wet ingredients to the dry, mixing well. Add more water if you want yours to be more runny. Microwave on high for 2:30, then let stand for one minute before eating. You can cook for longer or shorter depending on the volume and desired viscosity of the cereal, but cook for at least 90 seconds to ensure the egg white is cooked.

While I did come up with this recipe, the idea for letting it sit overnight in excess liquid to increase the volume was inspired by a similar post on Chocolate Covered Katy. You may want to check it out.