I came across this recipe for a sweet treat to try while dieting because it's made with mostly low-sugar/ high protein ingredients. One of the main ingredients is Greek yogurt, so it does have the yogurt tang to it, so be thoughtful of that when deciding on what flavors and mix-ins you want to try. Also, while the texture was perhaps something reminiscent of cookie dough, it wasn't exactly like cookie dough.
(Once made, I was able to put almost all of it back into the yogurt container for storage, hence the picture below. The amount that wouldn't fit was only a couple of spoonful, so that was my little snack in the bowl pictured below. To make it prettier, the original recipe topped the cookie dough with some sprinkles in your bowl, but I didn't do that for these pictures.)
Protein "Cookie Dough" Snack
Ingredients:
- 1 large 32 oz container of Greek yogurt
- 2 pkg. zero-sugar instant pudding mix (or 1 family sized pkg, approximately 6 oz total)
- mix-in's of your choice
Directions:
- In a large bowl with a hand mixer, combine the yogurt with the pudding mix until combined.
- Prepare your mix-ins into bite-sized pieces if necessary, and fold into the yogurt mixture.
Marsha's Notes:
- The entire tub of yogurt is 500 calories and two standard boxes of pudding mix combined are 240 calories. The recipe is recommended to make 5 servings, which comes out to 148 calories per serving if you don't add any mix-ins. I actually found that my little bowl with just a couple spoonfuls in it was plenty, so I might be able to get 8-10 servings out of my container.
- You can use any flavor of pudding, yogurt and mix-in that you think would be delicious or fits your dietary needs. Just remember that this "cookie dough" will not be exactly like a generic cookie dough base and it will have that distinctive tang of Greek yogurt, so consider that when picking flavors.
- My mix-ins were two toaster pastries. I used the frosted strawberry kind to pair with my vanilla Greek yogurt and vanilla pudding mixes.
- One family-sized pudding mix is about 5.9 oz, while two standard boxes are 3.5 oz. Since my grocery store didn't have the zero-sugar kind in the larger family-sized boxes, I substituted for two of the smaller standard boxes instead and everything seemed to turn out just fine, so that's how I listed the ingredients above.
- The yogurt thickens up pretty quickly and tightly with all that pudding mix, which is why I felt like a hand mixer was necessary.
- The original recipe specified "protein toaster pastries" but my store doesn't carry those, so I had to just use regular ones which probably have less protein and more sugar, but I wanted to test the recipe as closely to the original as I could. Having done so, now in the future I might try to pick my mix-ins differently because you can really just add in whatever you like.
- Some mix-in ideas would be fresh or dehydrated/freeze-dried fruit, chocolate chips, chopped up candy bars or protein bars, cookies, and sprinkles.
