Guiltless Sweetie Cakes

I wanted to make two desserts this Valentine's: one for Ruby, and one for the Engineer.  (Unfortunately all Violet is getting is a new flavor of baby food.  She'll be so jealous.)

Ruby is really into baking with me in the kitchen.  It's really difficult to make baking healthy.  Some don'ts: Don't use light butter in lemon bars. (Crunchy – yucky.) Don't put in a whole lot less sugar than your cookie recipe requires.  Don't give up entirely and eat an entire pan of brownies.

Not that I have done any of those things.

One trick I had not tried but had heard about over and over again was using a can of diet soda as a replacement for the wet ingredients when using a boxed cake mix. I read online recipes for this sort of thing, and I decided to try it.

Obviously the perks of doing something that sounds this crazy would be, if the end result tastes yummy you essentially are removing all of the fat and many calories out of cake.  Cake comes in so many flavors and varieties, I thought if I mastered this trick I would be a genius.

I do want include this disclaimer: When you are making low-fat, healthified recipes, you must remove from your mind the possibility that your result will taste exactly like the real thing.  It will taste different.  Different is not worse; it is just different.  Sometimes I like it better. But if I had gone into this experiment  expecting my cake to taste like full-fat, artery-clogging, decadent cake, I would have been disappointed.

On the contrary, Ruby and I loved our mini strawberry cupcakes.  We chose strawberry cake to make it pink, for Valentine's Day.

Guiltless Mini Strawberry Cupcakes


For the cake:
1 box strawberry cake mix (We used Pillsbury.)
1 can diet lemon-lime soda (We used Sierra Mist. I also believe diet Cream Soda would be yummy.)

For the frosting:
1/2 pint fresh strawberries
1 container Cool Whip Free

Preheat your oven to the setting on back of cake box.  Prepare your muffin tin by placing paper liners in the cups. For this recipe, you must use paper liners.  If you do not use liners, you will never, ever get your cupcakes out of your tin.

We chose to make mini cupcakes because they are tiny, and it controls your portion size.  Even if you eat two or three, your waistline still will be visible tomorrow.

Begin by emptying the dry ingredients from your cake mix into a bowl.  Proceed to pour in the one can diet soda.  It is better if the diet soda is at room temperature rather than chilled.

Stir ingredients until well combined.  Your mixture will look a little bit foamy and frothy.  It reminds me of one of those products Nickelodeon sells, Slime or Floam or something.

Use a large spoon to fill your muffin cups almost but not quite to the top of the paper.  These muffins still rise but perhaps not as much as a regular recipe does.

Bake the cupcakes as long as the directions on the box indicate, but do check them a minute or two early.  Obviously, most boxes do not include directions for mini muffin tins.  The perfect time for my cupcakes was 12 minutes.  You can test your cupcakes by inserting a toothpick in the center.

Let your cupcakes cool completely before frosting.  If you do not, your frosting will melt, and it will not be pretty.  Not that I made that mistake or anything.

Growing up, my favorite cake my mom made was frosted with a mixture of Cool Whip and chocolate pudding.  Cool Whip makes cake yummy.  Who am I kidding? Cool Whip makes everything yummy.

Speaking of Cool Whip, Cool Whip Free is maybe my favorite food.  If you can even call it a food... It is more like a jiggly, fluffy, sweet enigma.  

To make your frosting, wash your strawberries and cut off the tops.  Cut them into fourths and place in a bowl.  

Use a potato masher to grind those berries into runny, red juicy pulp.  You are welcome to do this in food processor, but my food processor weighs 100 lbs. so I only use it when it would be way too difficult to purée something another way.  Berries are very puréeible.

That photo is the beginning.  When you are finished, you will basically have strawberry syrup.  I didn't take a photo of it because I didn't.

Empty the entire container of Cool Whip Free into your strawberry syrup and stir.  Your Cool Whip will not turn red, but if you sample your frosting it will taste like strawberries.  I know all of you know that Cool Whip + strawberries = love.  

Using a small spatula, frost your cooled baby cupcakes.  

Do be warned that the cupcakes will be pretty sticky, almost like a brownie.  However, they do not taste like a diet dessert because real sugar remained in the cake mix.  

What you have now are bite-sized sweetie cakes for your sweetie for Valentine's Day.

You will need to keep your cupcakes refrigerated to keep them because of the Cool Whip.  If you've ever saved a cake frosted with Cool Whip frosting, you know it's even better the next day: moist, cool and filling.  

Tomorrow, on Valentine's Day, I plan to make the Engineer one of the world's most beautiful desserts, healthy style.  My post most likely will appear on Monday.

Happy Day of Love! (And please excuse the melty frosting in this photo!)