Nikki's Fabulous Weight Loss Mini Carrot Cake Cupcakes!!!

"Gauranteed to make you lose weight"
*disclaimer, you will only lose weight if your only food option is Nikki's Fabulous Weight Loss Mini Carrot Cake Cupcakes*

I've made carrot cake layered in cream cheese icing several times and am quite convinced that while carrot cake is good, cream cheese frosting was invented by angels who, in their infinite generosity, deigned to share their gloriously luscious creation with us mere mortals who are entirely undeserving of its magnificence... in other words: cream cheese frosting is YUM! However I am attempting to be healthy and have been thinking about making a healthified version of carrot cake for awhile. Also I love anything in miniature, there's something about bite sized foods that make my heart go pitter pat... maybe its the fact that I can eat THREE bite sized brownies/cookies/cupcakes/perogis for every ONE normal size one... and three is way better than one... right? So, I geared up to create the most amazingly delicious desert that anyone had ever tasted. I had already invisioned myself handing out the beautiful little confections to my friends and coworkers, being ever so modest as they showered me with compliments, sharing in their astonoshment that these dainty morsels of ambrosial perfection were actually *gasp* HEALTHY!

yeah... it didnt quite go like that...

I started with my basic carrot cake recipe that has never failed me before, it calls for such fattening delights as buttermilk, oil, butter, cream cheese and above all SUGAR! I started editing from there and decided that I could sub out applesauce & mashed banana for the oil, and since those are so sweet on their own I surely wouldn't need sugar. I replaced the buttermilk with greek yogurt and replaced some of the white flour with a Bob's Red Mill high fiber cereal. I guess I should have sensed that this wasn't going to work out after my new gadget didnt work... I found this mandoline style slicer/grater thingy for only $3.99 at my local discount store... yes I do realize that if its $3.99 there's a reason... and its not that the benevolent manufacturers created such an amazing product that they just HAD to share it with the world with no concern about profit... anyway it was plastic and POSSIBLY would be good for grating something really soft... like velveta... although that might still be to hard... but never fear I have my black & decker handy chopper and although it took several batches to come up with 2 cups of carrots they were perfectly evenly pulverized... I added all my ingredients (seriously they tasted so bad I'm not going to bother giving you the breakdown... you don't want to know it!) and tasted the dough... it wasn't bad... it wasn't a dainty morsel of ambrosial perfection yet... but hey my regular carrot cake isn't really that amazing uncooked either.

So I lined my mini muffin pan with cheerful rainbow liners and filled them with the dough, popped them in my oven and sat back to wait for the magic to happen... They smelled amazing which I decided was a preliminary indicator of their impending magnificence. After checking them several times I decided they weren't going to fully set no matter how long they baked so I pulled them out, let them cool a few minutes and (slighlty giddily) took the first bite... and almost spit it out... This couldnt be! My perfect little treats were... BITTER?!?!?! I tasted another one (yeah yeah I know they all came from the same bowl of dough, if one is nasty they all are gonna be... but a girl can hope right?) that one was gross too so that batch went in the trash. After agonizing consideration I decided that I should add some sugar... not a lot, just 1/3 cup to balance the bitterness a bit... enough that I was already feeling the first twinges of failure though... these would not be the perfectly healthy delights I had envisioned... That didnt work either and I finally gave up for the night. I froze the remaining dough just in case I come up with a blast of inspiration on how to fix it (suggestions? anyone?) cleaned up the mess and got a glass of wine to console myself... I take culinary imperfection very personally...

I won't go into detail on how I managed to screw up the cream cheese icing... suffice it to say it wasn't much better than the cupcakes...