Healthy Snack of the Week: Baking Brownies for Halloween and Beyond

Brownies are a quintessential snack time treat.

They’re easy to make, easy to transport, and easy freeze for future use.

Come holiday time—like Halloween—they’re also easy to decorate in spooktacular fashion.

But, you ask, how do we make a more healthy brownie that retains all that chocolate, gooey goodness of a decadent dessert?

Cynthia Myers, on LiveStrong.com, offers five tips for healthier brownie ingredients:

• Substitute white whole wheat flour for half of the flour in a recipe. Your brownies will taste lighter and contain more fiber.
• Replace up to half the butter or oil (and half the fat) in a recipe with applesauce, prune puree or mashed white beans. Note that this will reduce cooking time by 25 percent.
• Reduce the amount of sugar in a typical recipe by one-third. No one will know the difference.
• To reduce fat, replace every ounce of melted baking chocolate in a recipe with three tablespoons of cocoa.
• Using two egg whites in place of each egg in a recipe will reduce cholesterol and fat.

The recipe is adapted from a blonde zucchini bar recipe with chocolate chips (111 calories each).

And check out this flourless recipe for brownies made with black beans.

PopSugar.com offers numerous recipes for healthier brownies, including one for “slimmed-down brownies”  (125 calories), featuring non-fat Greek yogurt, and another for vegan brownies made with spinach.

MyRecipes.com suggests a 147-calorie recipe for chewy brownies. Made with low-fat milk, fewer eggs, and less sugar and butter than traditional brownies, the result is a lower-fat delight.

Using reduced-fat cream cheese enables this FoodNetwork.com recipe for cheesecake brownies to come in at 200 calories each.

For more Halloween-themed creative recipes beyond brownies, be sure to check out Babble.com.

Be sure to look for more Snack of the Week suggestions and information on healthy eating on Learning Liftoff’s food pages. If you have a favorite healthy brownie recipe, please don’t hesitate to share!