Nut butter blueberry...ummm cakes, bars, cupcakes...snacks

Today was Will's last day of school, and I wanted to make a special after school snack for him to celebrate.  At the same time, I knew he would already be wound up, and I didn't want to abandon my principles of low sugar/high protein snacks.  I decided I wanted to use almond butter and blueberries in some way, since that's what we had in the house.  I wasn't able to find exactly what I was looking for on the internet, but I used a few recipes as inspiration and made something up.  They turned out pretty well - Will said "they're awesome!" and ate 3 or 4 of them.  

Here's what I did:

1/2 c. almond butter

1/4 c. pecan butter (really, you could use 3/4 c of any nut butter or combinations you want)

1/2 c. rolled oats

1 c. coconut (I had sweetened, flaked coconut on hand, so that's what I used)

3/4 t. baking soda

1/2 - 1 t. cinnamon (optional)

1 egg

Berry sauce (see below)

Mix the first 7 ingredients together.  Press about half or a little more than half of the dough into the bottom of 8-10 muffin cups.  Dough should be about 3/8" thick in the bottom of the cups.  Fill the muffin cups most of the rest of the way with berry sauce.  Pat the remaining dough into circles and place on top of the berries.  Bake at 350 for ~25 min.  Let cool to set, then remove from pan.  

Berry sauce:  I used Mom's/Kanga's technique to make my sauce.  I always have frozen mixed berries (blue, red razz, and blackberries) on hand, so I put probably about 1 c. of these into the pan with a bit of water, then when it got hot and liquidy, thickened it to pretty thick with cornstarch.  I then added about 1 1/2 c. or so of fresh blueberries to the sauce and spooned that directly into the muffin tins.  The result, was a thick, softly solid berry layer with almost whole blueberries in it.

These ended up a little bit crumbly, but if handled carefully they held their shape.  As I mentioned above, I used the sweetened coconut, because that's what I had.  There was no other additional sugar, and these didn't end up tasting sweet.  I think when I make them again, I would be inclined to try to start with unsweetened coconut.  I think they may not need any sugar, but you could always add sugar to taste.  

I'm sure this could also be baked in a baking dish, though I like the muffin tin because it provides easy portion control.  

I'll be adding this one to my repertoire of health snacks that the kiddos like.

-Maggie

Reduced sugar baking

Since we cut back on sugar, most baked good recipes taste too sweet.  Much as my mother did with fat for most of my childhood, I have gotten in the habit of routinely reducing the sugar by half to a third even for cakes and cookies.  Additionally I started noticing that things tasted too salty--was it because we eat such a low salt diet?  Finally, it dawned on me that when you cut back on sugar you also need to cut back on the salt by the same amount.  I'm sort of surprised by this; maybe it's obvious to those who know more about baking.  With this tweak, we find that the missing sugar does not harm the texture and improves the flavor of scones, cakes, and cookies.