Last week I was going through cookbooks and cooking magazines to decide what I still wanted or used. One of my all time favorite cooking magazines is Taste of Home, they have such great recipes! As I was cutting the recipes out, I realized that there is a good chunk of these dishes that I cannot have while I am eating low carb. Looking at the ingredients, I thought to myself "I can fix this". Why not do recipe makeovers for these? When I told my husband he really thought it was a good idea and even suggested making TikTok videos with them (not sure that I am ready for that yet). He also suggested trying to do makeovers for other ways of eating - low calorie, gluten free, etc. While I love this idea, I am going to shelf it for a bit until I find my groove with making these low carb.
For my very first recipe makeover I made Pecan-Stuffed Waffles! When I picked this recipe, I didn't realize what a transformation this would be! When I added the ingredients into the Very Well Fit Recipe Calculator I did not believe the results. I decided to Google each items carb count and added them together and you know what? It was right!!! Off by a few carbs but I was AMAZED by the amount of carbs in this dish - it is over double my daily carb count. You can even eat 2 whoppers (they are 57 carbs) for the amount of carbs in this!!! This to me was CRAZY!
So here is the original recipe from the Taste of Home Magazine and the nutritional value calculator readout...Net Carbs for this dish (1 serving) 104.8 carbs!
Like I said, I didn't believe the carb count but guess what? That 1 cup of Maple Syrup is a whooping 211g of carbs!!! Craziness! Each serving gets 1/4 cup of syrup which is 52.75g of carbs. Now a little side note, when I made this, it was VERY hard to use 1/4 cup. It was A LOT ! I ended up using about 1/8 cup (about 2 TBSP - which is an actual serving size for the syrup that I used). Needless to say, you can cut the carbs down a little bit if you cut down the syrup amount.When I made these this morning, I did not use frozen waffles and I did make carb loaded waffles for my family and low carb waffles for myself. As crazy as it seems, the box mix ends up being MORE carbs than the frozen waffles.I did another version of the nutritional calculator taking out the frozen waffles but I couldn't get it to find the box mix that I used so I will show the information off the box and do some quick math to show the total carbs using the box mix.
We have 73.8 carbs with the syrup/filling PLUS 43 carbs for these 2 waffles (each waffles is 1/4 cup of batter). GRAND TOTAL of 116.8g of carbs!!! I will show my makeover nutritional information at the very end with the carb difference with both of these versions.
Here are the ingredients that I used...I actually did not use the Swerve Confectioners Sugar but wanted to show that was an option which was also called for on the recipe. A serving size of it is 1 tsp. with a Net Carb of 0 (because of the sugar alcohols). If you were to add 1 tsp of powdered sugar to the original recipe it would be another 4.2 carbs.
Here is my cute NEW Dash Mini Waffle Iron with a pro-tip of putting a paper plate under it in case you add too much waffle batter so it will not make a mess on your counter.
Here are my bowls of batter: Left side is the regular batter and the right side is Birch Benders Keto Pancake Mix.
This photo is the filling using all of my makeover items.
What I changed:
* I used the keto pancake/waffle mix (3/4 cup mix, 1 TBSP oil & 1/2 cup water)
* I used 2 TBSP Truvia Brown Sugar Blend instead of 1/2 cup Brown Sugar
* I used Maple Grove Farms Sugar Free Maple (flavor)Syrup instead of Maple Syrup
Finished product:
And here is the total Carb count...again, the calculator would not find the Keto waffle mix so I have to add it together on here...are you ready?
The 2 waffles are 5 carbs. Each waffle was made with 1/3 cup of batter PLUS the 6.2 net carbs from the syrup & filling is a TOTAL of 11.2 carbs!!! What a makeover!!!
Original Recipe: 104.8 carbs - 11.2 carbs (my way) is an 93.6 carb difference!!!!
Box batter mix version: 116.8 carbs - 11.2 carbs (my way) is a 105.6 carb difference!!!
This to me is absolutely amazing!!! And if you stuck out and read this whole transformation, thank you! It was so much fun to do this and I cannot wait to do this again next week! I just need to go through the stack of recipes to see what catches my eye!
Have a great Tuesday!
~Shannon