Recipe: Shortcakes With Strawberries

As we strive to reduce our risk for heart disease — and our waistlines — we often forego some of our most beloved foods, like dessert. While this is a good strategy to follow most of the time, you don’t have to exclude desserts entirely from your life. In fact, rich, decadent desserts can fit into a heart-healthy eating plan, especially when you use a little culinary know-how and portion control.

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This recipe demonstrates how simple ingredient substitutions can result in mouthwatering masterpieces that will fool your biggest healthy-dessert skeptics. Although most of our desserts can’t be called low-fat, they certainly have less total fat, saturated fat and trans fat levels, which help promote a heart-healthy lifestyle and give a little oomph to your next mealtime or dinner party.

To cut the total fat and saturated fat in this dessert even further, try using regular — not light — Smart Balance trans-free tub spread in place of butter. You’ll drop the total fat to 6 grams per serving and saturated fat to 2 grams.

Ingredients

For the biscuits

1 ¼ cups all purpose flour
½ cup whole wheat flour
2 tablespoons Splenda Blend sugar substitute, plus extra for sprinkling on unbaked biscuits
1 tablespoon baking powder
¼ teaspoon salt
¼ cup (½ stick) chilled, unsalted butter, cut into half-inch cubes (or Smart Balance spread)
1 cup plus 2 tablespoons low fat plain yogurt
1 tablespoon grated orange peel

For the berries and cream

3 1-pint baskets strawberries, hulled and sliced
¼ cup Splenda Blend sugar substitute
2 tablespoons thinly sliced fresh mint
½ teaspoon grated orange peel
1 cup low-fat frozen whipped topping

Directions

Make the shortcakes

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Line baking sheet with parchment paper.
Blend flours, 2 tablespoons sugar substitute, baking powder, and salt in food processor for five seconds. Add butter. Pulse or process until mixture resembles coarse meal.
Add 1 cup low-fat yogurt and orange peel. Process just until moist clumps form. Avoid over-processing into a ball of dough.
Dump dough clumps onto a work surface and form into a ball, gently knead five turns. Roll out dough on a floured surface to ¾” thick round. Using 2” diameter cutter, cut out three to four rounds. Gather scraps of dough and reroll as needed to make more 2” rounds. Arrange rounds on prepared sheet.
Brush with remaining 2 tablespoons yogurt. Sprinkle tops lightly with sugar substitute.
Bake biscuits until pale golden and tester inserted in center comes out clean, about 20 minutes. Cool 12-15 minutes.

Make the berries and cream

Combine berries, ¼ cup sugar substitute, mint, and orange peel in medium bowl to blend. Let stand at least 30 minutes and up to 2 hours to macerate the berries, stirring occasionally.
Cut biscuits horizontally in half. Place biscuit bottom in each bowl. Top each with berries, then whipped topping and biscuit top.