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French silk pie is a decadent — and delicious — chocolate dessert, and this version has less fat and fewer calories than the traditional recipe.
Dave Williams / Wichita Eagle
Mini French Silk Pies
Serves 12
For crust:
* Cooking spray
* 7 Oreo cookies
* 8 chocolate graham cracker squares
* 4 tablespoons light butter, melted
* 1 tablespoon sugar
For filling:
* 1/2 cup butter, softened
* 1/4 cup of 1/3-less-fat cream cheese, room temperature
* 1/4 cup sugar
* 2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
* 1/2 cup semisweet chocolate chips, melted and cooled
* 3/4 cup egg substitute, such as EggBeaters
* 1 1/2 cups Cool Whip Lite
Lightly coat a nonstick standard-size muffin tin with cooking spray. To make crust, seal the Oreos and graham crackers in a zip-top bag and use a rolling pin to crush them into fine crumbs. Put the crumbs in a medium bowl. Add melted light butter and sugar until mixed well. Divide the crumb mixture evenly among 12 standard-size muffin cups. Press the crumbs firmly into the bottom of each muffin cup, then place the muffin tin in the freezer for 20 minutes.
While the crust is in the freezer, in a medium bowl beat the butter, light cream cheese and sugar with an electric mixer on medium speed until light and fluffy. Beat in vanilla and melted chocolate. Gradually beat in egg substitute on high speed for about 3 minutes, or until light and fluffy. Spoon the French Silk filling into the chilled crusts and refrigerate for at least two hours or until well chilled. To serve, run a knife around the edge of each muffin cup and remove the mini French Silk pies. Just before serving, top each mini pie with 2 tablespoons of Cool Whip Lite.
Per serving: 261 calories, 16.8 g fat, 26 g carbohydrates, 28 mg cholesterol, 204 mg sodium, 0.5 g fiber, 2.5 g protein.
Filling adapted from a Betty Crocker recipe. Crust adapted from a Good Housekeeping recipe.

Food

Banish your guilt with this special pie

Just a little bit of tweaking makes all the difference
By Kathy Manweiler
McClatchy Newspapers
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 02.13.2008
For all those chocolate fans out there, this one's for you: A healthier version of French Silk Pie.
Instead of pastry, use a chocolate cookie crust. But just one serving of a common cookie crust recipe contains 144 calories and more than 8 grams of fat.
To slim down that crust, start by substituting light butter. Next, use chocolate graham crackers in place of most of the Oreos. The chocolate graham crackers are lower in fat and calories, but when the graham cracker crumbs are mixed with the cookies, the Oreos are all that you can taste.
For the filling, use some reduced-fat cream cheese in place of one-third of the butter to save fat and calories. We experimented with a version that contained half butter and half reduced-fat cream cheese, but that filling didn't come out as light and fluffy as we wanted.
And while light butter works well for this crust, it's not a good fit for the filling because it changes the texture too much.
The original filling calls for unsweetened baking chocolate and a cup of sugar, but slash the calories and keep the sugary flavor by choosing semisweet chocolate chips and adding a little extra vanilla to 1/4 cup of sugar.
Top the filling with some Cool Whip Lite instead of sweetened whipping cream, saving plenty of fat grams and calories.
To make portion control easier, put this recipe in muffin cups. The alterations to this dessert cut the calories by 37 percent and trimmed the fat by 42 percent.
You can have one of these Mini French Silk Pies for 261 calories and 16.8 fat grams.
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