Slightly better for you strawberry cupcakes

People who know me probably know that I'm not big into desserts. That is, after I eat my entree I hardly ever have any desire to eat any more food.  But that's not to say that I hate sweets - quite the contrary, actually. I just prefer to eat my sweets as separate snacks, when I'm actually hungry.  But of course many sweets have the evil trinity of too much sugar, fat, and carbs, all in one delicious little package.  There are methods to decrease elements of this evil trinity, of course - using applesauce or Greek yogurt in place of oil, switching out all purpose flour for whole wheat, and using less sugar.  And I've utilized all of these with great success.  As I continue my journey to trying to eat better, I'm hearing "experts" on all sides telling me what's good and what's bad, to stay away from "processed" foods at all costs and that artificial sweeteners are bad for you.  It's all quite confusing and contradictory.  And personally, I say that even the unbiased, relatively objective research is still mixed on artificial sweeteners, not even to mention the highly biased research that's also out there.  So, in the meantime, I will continue to enjoy them.  If you are steadfastly against all artificial sweeteners, that's your choice.  And you probably should skip this recipe.

Hungry Girl is all about the artificial sweeteners but she's also about increasing fiber in your diet naturally and bulking up meals with vegetable "fillers" like cauliflower so that you can fill your plate and still eat less calories. For these second two reasons, I'm willing to give some of her wackier recipes a try.

One thing she is known for is taking regular old boxed cake mix and adding diet soda to it to make cake.  Just diet soda - no egg, oil, or water.  The diet soda you use should gel well with the cake you are making - apparently diet cherry Coke is great with chocolate cake.  She has several variations of these concoctions and I decided to take two of her variations and combine them into a new recipe that I just kind of made up: strawberry cupcakes with strawberry frosting.

Ingredients for the cupcakes

Half of an 18.25-oz. box (about 1 3/4 cups) moist-style yellow cake mix*
1/2 tsp. baking powder

8 oz. of sugar free Sprite

1/2 teaspoon of vanilla extract

1 teaspoon of strawberry extract

red food coloring (optional, and really just to make the batter pink)

Preheat oven to 375.  Prepare a cupcake pan with 12 cupcake liners. Mix all of these ingredients together in a bowl and then pour.  It should make 12 cupcakes, more or less.  Bake about 20 minutes, or until toothpick inserted in the middle of a cupcake comes out clean.  Let cool.

Meanwhile, prepare the frosting.  You'll need:
1 cup Cool Whip Free, thawed
3 teaspoons sugar free strawberry preserves

1 and 1/2 tablespoons Jell-O Sugar Free Fat Free Vanilla Instant Pudding Mix
More strawberry extract (optional, to your taste)

Mix these together in a bowl and then chill in the fridge, at least an hour.

Once chilled and the cupcakes are cool, lightly spoon the frosting onto the cupcakes.  Note that this frosting isn't very room temperature stable so you'll need to store the cupcakes in the fridge until you eat them.  They are quite delicious!

Note: since making this recipe I found this mysterious powder at the store that's meant to stabilize whipped cream used in frosting so it holds its shape at room temperature.  I wonder if it will work for this frosting as well?  I'll have to try when I make these again!

*or you know, you can just buy strawberry flavored cake mix.  I just happened to already have half a box of the yellow cake mix in the pantry.