37 Calorie Brownies – Fantastic or Failure?

Whether you’re looking to lose weight or maintain, if you enjoy dessert you’ve probably looked for low-calorie recipes for your favorite foods. I certainly have. Pinterest, my frenemy in the realm of recipe sourcing, showcased a recipe for 37 calorie brownies. Seriously. A skeptic at heart, I pinned it, hoping to try it in the future. Why didn’t I try it immediately, you ask? Well, the recipe calls for granulated stevia. I don’t have anything against artificial sweeteners for the most part. I use “blue stuff” in my coffee in the morning, but I don’t bake with it, partially because I don’t feel like spending the money on it, partially because I don’t bake sweets at home very often, but mostly because baking with artificial sweetener never turns out to be as satisfying as baking with real sugar. The old adage is “if it’s too good to be true, it probably is”. However, in the interest of my own home-brewed brand of food science, and for you, dear readers, (okay okay I really wanted brownies, too) I decided I would go ahead and give them a shot.

I purchased granulated sucralose instead of stevia, because I’ve personally had a reaction to stevia in the past. Nothing crazy, it just caused some digestive issues. The only other recipe deviations I made was to bake it in a loaf pan, and to just stir it in a bowl instead of using a blender or food processor, because I was being LAZY. I had already had to clean my stand mixer from another recipe, and I didn’t want to bother with cleaning the food processor, too. So I stirred together the wet ingredients and then added the dry. I poured it into the loaf pan, which was lined with foil and sprayed with cooking spray, and baked it for 20 minutes. I allowed it to cool and cut it into 8 pieces, so it should have been slightly more than 37 calories. For some reason, my calculator says it was 56 calories. Still not bad.

But how do they TASTE? I recruited The Hubs to help me taste them. Well, they are neither fantastic nor a failure. The texture was not brownie-like: you could definitely feel the oats (and see them if you look closely at the photos). The flavor was okay, but not intensely chocolaty like I prefer my brownies. The Hubs liked them fine. I think I will try them again (I mean, I have to do something with that giant bag of granulated sucralose *rolls eyes*) but blend them like the original recipe suggests. I think this will help the texture. The original recipe also suggested adding chocolate chips to the recipe, which I think I’ll try also.

In summary, I will try this recipe again, with some tweaks. My recipe calculated out to 56 calories apiece, so you could eat TWO of these for just over 100 calories. Not bad, really. Not perfect, but good. Would I serve these to company? Heck no! But I will try them again.

56 Calorie Brownies

• ¾ cup nonfat greek yogurt
• ¼ cup skim milk
• ½ cup Cocoa powder
• ½ cup Old fashioned rolled oats
• ½ cup Splenda for baking
• 1 egg
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 pinch salt

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 400°F.

Line a loaf pan with foil and spray with cooking spray.

In a medium sized bowl, stir together all of the ingredients. Pour into the prepared dish and bake for about 20 minutes.

Allow to cool completely before cutting into 8 squares.