Diet-Friendly Cupcakes (Low Carb, No Sugar Added, Fat Free)

Cupcakes and muffins are wonderful treats, but when you're on a diet, seeing the Instructables home page littered with cupcake recipes can be torturous.

Personally, I like to play with recipes and make diet-friendly versions of the foods I miss when I'm trying to drop a few pounds for beach weather.

The following recipe is for subtly sweet cupcakes which, without their frosting, admittedly border on being muffins

Ingredients:
For the Cupcakes:
2.5 tsp baking powder
3 egg whites
6 tblsp oat bran
200 mL skim milk
3 tblsp skim milk powder
3 tblsp Splenda*
flavour of choice (for this, we're using coconut oil**)
_{*Splenda is specifially used as my sweetener of choice because most other artificial sweeteners break down in baking, and you lose the sweetness, which is unacceptable.
**Flavour oils tend to be stronger than extracts, so for oils a few drops will suffice, whereas with extracts I'll use about 2 tsp.}

For the Frosting:
8 oz. fat free cream cheese
4 oz. fat free Greek Yogurt
1/2 cup Splenda
flavour of choice (for this we're using pineapple oil)

Tools:
Various Bowls
Silicone Spatula
Hand Mixer
Measuring Cups and Spoons

Step 1: Cupcake Batter

Using the hand-mixer, whip the egg whites on high until stiff.

In another bowl, mix all of the other cupcake ingredients.

Fold in the whipped egg whites.

Spoon the batter into lines cupcake molds, and bake for about 30 minutes in a pre-heated, 375^o F oven.

Let them cool before frosting.

Step 2: Cream Cheese Frosting

This is pretty easy. Let your cream cheese soften, and then proceed to mix all of the ingredients together. Feel free to add food colouring, if desired.

Step 3: Decorating Cupcakes and Counting Calories

Once the cupcakes are cooled, use a butter knife to spread the frosting on top. Feel free to garnish with sugar-free candies or chocolates (broken up), goji berries (which also go well mixed into the batter), or a drizzling of sugar-free syrup.

We've come out with 12 standard-sized cupcakes. So, after a quick bit of math, we see that they are (roughly) only:
313 calories for cupcakes
41 g total carbs (sorry Atkins folks, I'm not showing net carbs as I don't know how that works... :P)
315 calories for frosting
12 g total carbs

Coming out to just about the following for each individual cupcake:
26 calories and 3.5 g carbohydrates per cupcake
52 calories and 4.5 g carbohydrates per frosted cupcake
Which is pretty darn good!

So, even if you're on a hardcore diet, you can have your cupcake and eat it, too! Enjoy!