The Sugar Dilemma

So these past few days without refined sugar have shown me a few things. I really DO feel pretty good. I have more energy, I've lost a few pounds - I just feel better all around. It's made me want to try to continue this way of eating permanently. But the cupcake confrontation made me realize that I need to start researching alternatives. I can't go the rest of my life avoiding desserts. If I ever have a party to go to, I'd rather go armed with my own dessert then sit and rely on sheer willpower to see me through. So I started looking at alternative sugars. I don't mean splenda or equal, I'm talking about the natural stuff here. I figure if I'm working so hard to eat healthy and without refined sugars, then eating chemicals probably would just cancel out the hard work I'm doing. I do use Splenda, but it's usually just in my coffee. I just don't want to make a whole dessert using it cause that's a whole lot of Splenda.

So this morning I tried my hand at my first Sugar Free Dessert. Since I'm not eating white flour either that really limits what I can make so I thought - hey, what about cheesecake!

So I made cheesecake! Actually, I made mini cheesecakes.

And I used organic agave nectar instead of sugar.

First, I mixed together cream cheese, eggs, cream, lemon juice, vanilla and the agave nectar.

Here's the batter:



I also made a strawberry puree so I could make half of them strawberry cheesecakes!



Then I poured the batter into muffin tins and swirled the puree in some of the cups to make half regular and half strawberry cheesecake.



This was the hard part. I had no idea how long to bake them for. I think it ended up being right around 35 minutes and this is how they came out.



I tried one and it's not bad at all. I'm still waiting for my boyfriend to eat one because lets face it, I haven't had sugar in 4 days so I'm pretty sure anything sweet is going to taste good to me!

I think I'm going to hit a couple of bookstores today to see what I can find in the form of sugar free baking. My next challenge will be cakes and cookies!

Oh, and in case you're wondering, each one has 140 calories. I think that I could easily lower the calorie count but I'm already not using sugar. I think trying to substitute anything else would make it borderline inedible :)