Kitchen Escapades - Pizza

So after a great first day back on 1500 calories, I've managed to go over every day since :/ Tonight we had a movie night so I spent the day in the kitchen preparing for a homemade pizza party for dinner - besides baking bread for the week. Standing in the kitchen for hours and kneading dough should count as some exercise, right? I did Just Dance this morning for about 30 minutes and only burned 178 calories. Fun, but not the most bang for my buck. But I digress....

Twice now I have used this pizza dough recipe. The first time I made it, I thought I overworked the dough and stuck it in the fridge for later. I was really skeptical about it, but once I took it out of the fridge and started working with it, I discovered it was actually a really good dough and a great one to work with once it warmed back up. Pretty forgiving. I used it to make the Pioneer Woman's easy calzones which turned out really yummy (except Aaron didn't like them. He prefers regular pizza.) Though I used white sugar the first time I made the dough, this time I used honey. Calorie wise, sugar was the better way to go (for future reference).

I got 14 large calzones out of the dough. As far as actual pizza dough, it could make two large pizzas or be divided up into smaller ones. We decided to each make our own pizzas, so we ended up with 4 smaller dough balls and two medium sized (put in the freezer for another time). Aaron wanted to use the cookie cutters today, so he made a bunch of little pizzas shaped like Christmas cookies while Jared created the Millenium Falcon. I had a regular round thin crusted Hawaiian BBQ pizza with cilantro, and Matthew had a thick crusted face. It was great fun.

The best part came AFTER the pizza though - dessert. To go along with the pizza theme, I decided it would be nice to do a fruit pizza. I knew the basic concept, but googled for some recipes to nail down the concept and decided on this one for the cream cheese topping because I had all the ingredients. The cookie part seemed simple enough too but I opted to go with a ChocolateCoveredKatie grain free sugar cookie recipe instead. Per a commentor's suggestion from the allrecipes recipe, I used our frozen fruit and added some cream of tartar to thicken the juice as it thawed. Oh. My. Goodness!! It was SO delicous!!!! All 446 calories of it :P (Is it any wonder how I ended up 469 calories over tonight?!)

Here is the ingredient list for CCK's cookie:

• 1 cup finely-ground almond meal (also known as almond flour.) (75g)
• a little over 1/8 tsp salt (1/8 plus 1/16 tsp)
• 1/8 tsp baking soda
• 2 tbsp pure maple syrup, or stevia to taste (For substitutions, see nutrition link below.) (30g)
• 1 1/2 tbsp coconut or vegetable oil (15g)
• For maple syrup version: up to 2 level teaspoons milk of choice or extra oil, as needed (5-10g). For stevia version: 1 tbsp milk of choice, added with the liquid ingredients. (15g)
• 1 tsp pure vanilla extract
• optional: pure almond extract

What I did:

- Ground up 1 cup of almonds in the food processor, then measured out 1 cup of the meal. Followed the rest of the ingredient list subbing honey for the maple syrup, added 1 tsp of almond extract, and then misread the milk part and added 2 TABLESPOONS!! oops!!! Way too wet at that point, so I added in the rest of the almond meal, about 1/4 cup of white flour, then added an extra 1/8 tsp of salt and baking soda - essentially doubling the recipe for the dry ingredients. It was still sticky, but it was much closer to what I thought the consistency should be at that point so I followed through on the rest of the instructions and it worked!! It was the best dessert I've eaten in a long time!!

Cream Cheese Frosting: (I halved the recipe)

4 oz 1/3 fat cream cheese

1/4 c sugar

1 tsp vanilla extract

Blueberry Muffin and Lemon Cake for One

Blueberry Muffin for One and Lemon Cake
courtesy of chocolatecoveredkatie.com

As I've been trolling the CCK blog, I decided to make her cupcakes/muffins for breakfast. The boys both chose the lemon flavor and I went with the blueberry. She gives directions for baking them in the oven, but I was in a hurry and used the microwave instead. I cooked them each for one minute. Because mine used frozen blueberries I ended up adding an extra 10-15 seconds (don't remember). From my previous experience with minute muffins, if you put them in too long they turn hard. Apparently the longer these set out while the boys picked at them, the harder they got.

Aaron liked his and Jared said it tasted funny. I used olive oil in theirs and it was easily recognizable by my buds so I told them that's what it was. Jared did say it tasted lemony though. Mine wasn't bad. I subbed regular butter for the oil hoping for a better flavor. It worked, but when I inputted it in MFP I was shocked to see that 1 TB was 100 calories!!! YIKES! This seemingly innocent muffin turned into a 236 calorie breakfast besides the milk to drink it down. I played around just now with some of the oil options and olive oil would have been 120 calories so I definitely got the better deal with the butter. My best bet would have subbed half of it with applesauce (which is how I made Matthew's but it didn't rise as much).

The recipe is easy enough that I will have to play around with it a bit and see what I can do to slim it down more and further 'healthify' it. In the meantime, here's the link to all of her single serving muffin/cupcakes.

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As a side note, today I am feeling the 4 mph program I did yesterday. My legs haven't felt this sore for weeks when I quit running as much and mostly walked for long stretches of time for my exercise. It is nice to feel like I worked out yesterday not just be tired. Today I plan to do Chicken Fat to get some calisthenics in and see if we can't begin to get this core back in shape now that I have no physical limitations.

Dessert Mania

I stumbled upon the blog Chocolate Covered Katie recently and today in my productive mode, have set out to try her recipes. I just whipped up some Brownie Batter Dip, One Minute Chocolate Cake (for one though I shared it with Aaron), and the Deep Dish Cookie Pie is in the oven. She incorporates some surprise ingredients to fit her vegan life style so it is fun to find them so tasty!! I look forward to presenting the to the family tonight to see what they think. By the time Jared gets home I may have so many desserts I'll need a girl's night to have a place to share them and purge my house of the sweets!