Sugary Sweet

Anyone else on absolute sugar overload from the holidays? Maybe it's just me and my pregnant belly but this year felt particularly indulgent, and we still have loads of sweets in our pantry. At one point RJ casually mentioned, "I think we should put the Sees candy box up higher because Landon seems to be getting into it." Yeeaaahhhh, that's definitely Landon's doing alright...
 
I am actually sick of sugar, candy, ice cream, cookies and cakes. Yet, I still find myself eating it once  twice  up to three times a day! The probablem with sugar is once you start you just can't stop. The white stuff is addictive.

Having pregnancy as an excuse you would think I would just embrace 9 months of indulgence, but I actually feel quite guilty. At this point of my pregnancy whatever I eat the little dude both eats and tastes, and he is enjoying way too many sweets for one so young.

And he's not the only young lad who has been spoiled recently. A certain two year old seems to think that lolipops and snickerdoodles make up their own food group.

Quitting sugar cold-turkey is hard and honestly unrealistic for me and my family. We like our sweets. But we need to cut back and make them a special occurrence rather than the norm. During her 30 days of clean eating my friend Erin raved about a bunch of vegan, low/no sugar dessert recipes over at Chocolate Covered Katie. I remember thinking those sounded cool and then promptly heading to the kitchen for my second piece of marshmallow fudge.

I forgot about the healthy dessert blog until it popped up on Pinterest the other day and I decided to check it out. That gal Katie is a chocolate-covered vegan genius. The desserts on her blog look amazing and most of them are chalk full of healthy ingredients. This afternoon I was craving my usual after lunch dessert so I whipped-up some of this:

Cookie Dough Dip

Dip that tastes like cookie dough. Seriously. So. Good. I ate it on a graham cracker and my sugar craving was completely satisfied.

There is sugar in the recipe but way less than regular cookie dough. Plus, no raw eggs (yay for this preggers gal) and no butter. The fat comes from healthy almond butter and I added flax seed for an extra nutritional kick. The main ingredient: garbanzo beans. Basically it's chocolate chip hummus. Don't gag - I know it sounds really weird but it is surprisingly delicious. (I will be completely honest- if you think about eating garbanzo beans while chowing down you can taste them just the littlest bit, but if you didn't know you would never be able to tell.)


I am so excited to offer this to Landon for dessert tonight. I just know he's going to love it and I'm going to be silently chuckling watching him eat a big serving of beans and nuts while thinking I'm the best Mom in the whole wide world for allowing him dessert.