Low Calorie Baking Substitutes

From Baking Your Way to a Slimmer You:

1). Cut the butter – ...replace about half of the butter in cookies, biscuits and pie crusts with reduced fat cream cheese. Light cream cheese (also known as Neufachtel) has a similar texture to butter, reacts similarly in baking, but has a fraction of the fat and calories.

2). Utilize egg whites – When baking cakes, custards and cookies, replace some of the whole eggs with egg whites or Egg Beaters. Every egg yolk contains about 5 grams of fat and 213 mg. of cholesterol. By replacing some of the yolks with additional egg whites, you can cut down on the fat in many desserts.

3) Add orange juice – Relying on fruit juice to provide some of the sweetness in a recipe, rather than just using sugar, is a great way to cut back on the empty calories you often find in desserts.

4). Substitute sugar with a natural sweetener - ...use Truvia® natural sweetener, made from the Stevia plant. It is a natural, zero-calorie sweetener... a good rule of thumb is to replace ¼ cup of sugar in a recipe with 1/8 cup Truvia.

5). Replace the oil – ... oil gives the cake a nice texture, moist crumb, and about 900 extra calories per ½ cup! Thankfully fat free, or reduced fat, plain Greek style yogurt does the same trick with only about 85 calories per ½ cup. I replace 2/3 of the oil in my cake recipes with reduced fat Greek style yogurt..

I use apple sauce to replace oil. This past week I used mashed squash in some sweet bread with great results. I'm going to try the orange juice or other sweet juice as a sugar substitute.