Healthy baking

I am one of those people that tolerates cooking, but I love baking.  I haven't done it for over 2 years and am really missing it.  I would love to experiment with healthy low carb homemade breads and other recipes, but I don't know where to begin.  My biggest concern is finding a recipe that is labeled "healthy", but is still high in carbs, fat etc.  What guidelines do you go by in determining if a recipe is healthy.  How many carbs, sugar, protein etc?  Can I replace sugar with splenda?  Any other suggestions?

GOOD QUESTION !! I was just wondering about that last night--I'm known by both sides of the extended families (mine and DH) as the Christmas cookie and bread maker-lol. I would LOVE to learn how to bake healthier. Hope you get LOTS of replies !

 You can use recipe calculators to see how it changes the recipe to make substitutions, but there are lots of good recipes out there.   You can exchange applesauce or greek yogurt for most of the fat in many recipes, you can us agave to replace brown sugar, there are actually all kinds of exchanges that work well in many recipes.   I try to find recipes that use mainly whole grain flour, lessen the sugar with exchanges of fruit or agave or just drop some of it all together, and go light on the fat with exchanges and have had some great success over the years.   All of this was before WLS for me, so I don't know how compatible those recipes will be and I'm not ready to try them yet.

I love to bake! I don't always bake healthy things, but I've come up with some really good post-op friendly recipes that you might enjoy. The main things to do are to replace some or all of sweeteners with palm sugar, sucanat, dates, or molasses, use whole grains that have been processed as little as possible, and find ways to sneak in extra protein (i.e. replacing milk with greek yogurt or adding an extra whole egg or egg white). The more natural and whole your ingredients, the better nutrition you get.

Here are some of the most friendly post-op baked goods I've made. I hope you enjoy them!

Chocolate-Date Bars: http://neensnotes.com/2009/08/25/hot-dates-with-chocolate-fo otball-and-mystery-food/

Zucchini-Apple Bread: http://neensnotes.com/2010/03/07/battle-zucchini-bread/

Whole Wheat Cut Out Cookies: http://neensnotes.com/2008/09/24/catch-a-falling-star-cookie /

Whole Grain Pizza Dough: http://neensnotes.com/2009/05/11/inspiration-at-the-farmers- market/

Pecan Ricotta Waffles: http://neensnotes.com/2012/06/15/1324/

Peach-Berry Crumble (gluten-free): http://neensnotes.com/2010/06/08/something-sweet-for-sarah/

Apple Cake Bars: http://neensnotes.com/2008/07/24/the-planning-principle-plus -bonus-cake/

Chocolate Vita-Cupcakes: http://neensnotes.com/2008/08/20/the-happiest-cupcake/

Apple-Cinnamon Bread: http://recipes.sparkpeople.com/recipe-detail.asp?recipe=7617 31

Whole Wheat Soft Pretzels: http://recipes.sparkpeople.com/recipe-detail.asp?recipe=7366 91

These sound really good.  I can't wait to try them.  Thank you.

Well, firstly, I HIGHLY recommend Neen's recipes. They are made from good stuff and I've tried a few myself!

But other than that a few things to remember. Any cake, cookie, etc. that claims to be "low-carb" can only be so through two means. The first is if you use an ingredient that can act as a starch but is not starch. Like it is fully possible to make peanut butter cookies without any flour for instance. Secondly, and this is more pertinent to cakes and breads and the like, is that it has a lot of fiber. We can't digest dietary fiber so it counts against the total carb balance.

But on a nutrition label or when you enter that stuff on your food tracker it's still going to show up as carbs in your diet. So you have to take that information and put it into context. If you make a cake where the slices are 100 calories each with 16g carbs and 7g fiber, you really can only POTENTIALLY digest 9g of those carbs (if you are new you are likely malabsorbing some of that).

If you are new I'd encourage you to check out Atkins Baking Mix. It takes a minute to get into the swing of using it but it has protein in it. In the beginning if something doesn't have protein in it, you really shouldn't be bothered with it too much.

thank you. I have been trying to make your protein banana bread for several weeks now. I keep buying the bananas, but my kids (or maybe husband) keep gobbling them up before I can make the bread. I finally had to tell them nobody touches the bananas.

Quick question on the banana bread. Can I bake a regular size loaf as opposed to the mini loafs. Does the cook time compare to normal banana bread?

 I've never been able to make it work with full loaves. Protein cooks fast on the outside, slow on the inside so with a whole loaf anytime I tried it'd be burnt outside and perfect inside. 

But play around with the recipe. Maybe you can crack the code!

You can use splenda in baking (can get BIG bags in Walmart) I have some great old recipes; but I would imagine ALL of them are very high in sugar and carbs. I will continue to bake for others. As long as they go OUT of my house, It's all good!!