World-Class Real Food Sweets

In my transition to eating real food I’ve given up a lot of unhealthy, processed foods. Many of these are sweets. Oh, those cookies and frozen confections that once held me captive…no longer. Bewitched, bothered and bewildered no more! Honestly, since I’ve been feeding myself as God intended for us to eat, I no longer crave or even have any desire to eat the old junk I used to love. That’s not to say, however, that I don’t want an occasional treat!

Lucky for me, I’ve found some wonderful recipes to make delicious homemade real food sweets! I recently made the Chocolate Macaroons from the Heathy Home Economist.  They are a bit of a time investment, but not so much in labor. After you whip up the eggwhites and flavorings and actually bake the cookies, they need to continue to dry in the oven for several hours so it’s largely non-active time. It is worth it though – they are feather light and crunchy and delicious! I couldn’t find the chocolate extract her recipe calls for so I used almond extract and it turned out very nicely. The only problem I ran into is that my final product had random very small suuuuper crunchy (aka HARD) chunks that ended up in them. Perhaps I wasn’t vigorous enough when I folded in the dry ingredients, or maybe I should have sifted in the dry ingredients slowly. Or maybe I should go back and watch Sarah’s video again. Either way, I loved them and will definately make them again.

I also had the pleasure of stumbling upon Chef Emily Duff’s blog, Family2Table. In this post, she offers a variety of real food desserts, all of which look UH-maze-ing. I made the vanilla and maple syrup ice cream. Not only is the recipe very simple, it is the most delicious ice cream I’ve ever made (and I’ve made my fair share). I LOVE LOVE LOVE using the maple syrup as the sweetener. It is so sophisticated and is a gentle sweetness, not overpowering or harsh at all like some ice creams I’ve had. It reminds me a bit of French Vanilla, one of my all time favorite flavors. Maybe it’s the real vanilla bean, maybe it’s the mix of vanilla bean and maple syrup. All I know is that it is truly a thing of beauty and I recommend that everyone reading this run out and buy an ice cream maker if you don’t already have one and make this ice cream.

The cool thing about making these two recipes on the same day is that the ice cream calls for egg yolks only and the macaroons call for egg whites only. This way you don’t have to worry about wasting. You will end up with four extra yolks, but hey….you can save them for another batch of ice cream or make your morning scrambled eggs extra yolky!