A Calorie Engineer Valentine's Day

Got my wife some Roses:

Even better I made home made cupcakes with optional cherry frosting:

I started with a standard golden layer cake recipe.

• Replaced half the sugar with sugar free sweeter
• Substituted almond milk for the whole milk
• Substituted white whole wheat flour for cake flour.  Honest, I'd do that even if it was more calories.  Maybe it'd be softer with cake flour, but it was plenty soft and moist enough.  It is the difference between eating food and pure sugar.

In the end, they came out to 207 calories each (and 4.7 grams protein).  If I needed, there would be opportunities to pull down the calories even more.  For instance, I used 10 tablespoons of cream butter.  I could have used margarine or applesauce for all of part of that to lower the calories.  But I didn't for two reasons.  First, didn't want to change too many things at once.  I haven't made this recipe that many times.  Second, I didn't need too.  The 207 calories each is fine for my needs.  Know when to quit engineering and move onto the next challenge.
One tip in making cupcakes: Fold the dry and wet ingredients.  Don't mix.  The difference between cake and muffins.  Sure you have to dish wash an extra bowl, but it is Valentine’s day.  Suppose that's why I make more muffins than cup cakes, the other days :)

I still celebrate with food, but responsibility.  Yet, I don't celebrate only with food.  I took the family to the Indianapolis Children's museum.  I burned almost all the calories for one cupcake just from that trip.

Plus burned even more calories through cooking and tasks around the house and yard.  We had a bit of a snow here and that landed me even more unexpected calories through shovelling and ploughing snow.  With all that, I was running a bit low on calories consumed and needed to seek out more food to eat.  I already had two cupcakes in the day and didn't feel like another.  Honest, I didn't crave another.  Instead I had something healthy - mixed veggies with cream butter as a snack between meals.  That's become one of my frequent snacks when I'm low on calories.  I used a mix with carrots, so it has a good vitamin A boost.

I made dinner extra special by making steak.  For only 685 calories I had steak, mashed potatoes, cream gravy, and sourdough bread.  I didn't used to like steak all that much, growing up on hamburgers, but I've come to appreciate the low calories that lean steak has to offer.

And tonight looking forward to watching the season première of Walking Dead with my wife and a bowl of buttered popcorn.  This is our Sunday night tradition.  Popcorn is pretty low calories, as long as you don't over do the butter.

There you have it a random holiday.  Went on a family walking trip.  A little extra indulgent with the cupcakes.  But I engineered those to a lower level of calories.  Burned a good deal of calories from a walking and other activities.  And I still had a sensible breakfast, lunch, dinner, and post dinner snack.