The Research Continues

My PB&J party is this Saturday, and I’m continuing to experiment with new recipes and research ingredient substitutions.

I’ve been making No-Sugar-Added Peanut Butter Cookies for a while now, using Smart Balance Omega peanut butter, Splenda and egg white.  They come out pretty well.  They’re flavorful but too crumbly.  I decided to try making a batch using Better’n Peanut Butter and a new no-calorie, all-natural sweetener that I found at the Whole Foods: Wholesome Sweeteners Organic Zero. 

The Better’n Peanut Butter is a lot runnier than the other pb, so the mixture was no good for cookies.  I tried making bars, but even with a longer baking time, they were too liquid.  They may work as a pb fudge if I chill them for a while.  For the cookies or bars, I need to adjust the proportions or perhaps use a different pb cookie recipe entirely. 

The sweetener, though, seems to live up to its claims.  It has the same weight and texture as sugar; it even tastes pretty much like sugar straight out of the bag.  One big downside, unfortunately, is that it’s ridiculously expensive compared to sugar and even to Splenda.

My next project, in addition to the pb cookies, is to try a bundt cake using cake mix and diet soda and using Organic Zero as the sweetner for the glaze.