If you like eating desserts and sweets, you understand how difficult it is to control the temptation. But the whole ‘fuss’ around eating healthy and controlling sugar intake, may make you decide otherwise. However, there’s no better joy of eating sweets that are not just tasty but healthy too. And yes, it’s possible. Healthy sweet treat recipes are easy to make—natural ingredients work as a natural alternative to processed sugar and plant-based ingredients help to cut cholesterol. If you enjoy cooking and baking at home, we get you tips that will help you make healthiest the desserts.

Replace oil with fibrous natural ingredients
Oil is one of the important ingredients when it comes to baking cakes and cookies. It provides moisture to the cake and also helps in giving it taste. However, it’s also one of the unhealthiest ingredients that causes weight gain and higher levels of cholesterol. So, in a way when you take oil off the ingredient list, your healthy recipe is almost done. You can replace it with mashed ripe banana, pureed dates or mashed ripe avocados. These are low on calories as compared to oil and are also fibrous. You can also use organic almond butter which is a good fat. Good fat makes carbs absorption in blood stream a slower process.

Now that we are talking about baking healthy cookies, here’s a video where Chef and a Cookbook author, Kelly Keough teaches how to make healthy but yummier chocolate cookies. Her cooking philosophy is to make sweets with whole grains and proteins so it’s not just a dessert but a whole meal. Imagine having a chocolate cookie that’s healthy, satiates your taste buds and also makes you feel fuller. What more do you want? She explains the use of ingredients in detail and the health benefits of using them. She also suggests alternatives of unhealthy ingredients that are usually used while baking cookies.

Make smaller portions–it’s a part of healthy recipe
No, that doesn’t change the calorie count your dessert has on whole but smaller portion means restricted intake of calories. In a way you are eating something sweet, satisfying your taste buds and enjoying the taste. You don’t need to eat sweets as meals to fill your tummy. It’s same flavour, lesser calories in one go and definitely cute to look at!

Use flax instead of flour for healthy recipe
Flour is major contributor to calories as it’s nothing but carbs and little high o calories. You can grind flax seeds, make a powder to be used in place of flour. It’s healthier with lesser carbs. It has more of fibre, Omega Fatty acids, and other nutrients. It can also give a natural nutty flavour which means which might need not add extra unnatural flavours. Because wheat flour is made with processed grains, it doesn’t have much nutritional value. You can also add ground chia seeds for flavour or to replace flour, as you want.

Another healthy yet tastier option could be to replace flour with cocoa powder. It helps with one more thing—providing fluff to the cake because of its natural acidic property. It can also add great cocoa taste, has lesser calories and carbs.

Use Stevia instead of sugar
Stevia is a healthier alternative of sugar. As it’s too sweet, you might have to use it lesser than the processed sugar. There are different variants of stevia available in market; if possible, get the one used for baking. Liquid stevia is least processed and the healthiest. It doesn’t contain calories and is natural so it will not spike your blood sugar level