Sometimes it's worth it

I'm not exactly a health nut, but for the most part I try to cook healthy food and avoid butter and other bad, fatty things.  Even a lot of the stuff I bake is low fat, with little or no butter and good substitutes like applesauce.  Tonight, however, there was none of that.  Tonight I made wonderfully delicious Red Velvet Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting, and the most I can say for it health-wise is that I at least used a Smart Balance butter blend instead of the full out butter.  But oh man. Red velvet. So delicious.  I don't know if it's the fact that there's a whole bottle of red food dye in it, or the fact that a moist, just slightly chocolatey cake is covered in a creamy, sweet, cream cheese frosting, but these things are delicious.  I must have eaten at least 3 within the first hour they came out of the oven. I'm not ashamed. They're that good.  And while they're completely unhealthy, I'm kind of okay with it.  I believe moderation is the key to everything, so if I only make these once in a while (and possibly stop eating 3 at a time), it's totally fine.  Plus I'm planning on giving most of them away and making other people eat them.

Anyway, I got this recipe online, after doing research and finding lots and lots of red velvet recipes.  I used this recipe for the cupcake part, because the epicurious website has yet to fail me with any recipes, but then I wanted cream cheese frosting instead of vanilla so I switched to this recipe and just followed the directions for the icing.  The only thing I changed was only adding 4 cups of powdered sugar instead of 5 to the icing, because I thought it was plenty sweet with just 4. And I have a pretty intense sweet tooth, so that's saying a lot.

On a side note, I almost always bake from scratch (like tonight) because I think it's way better and much more satisfying.  However, last night I had a terrible craving for boxed chocolate brownies, and let me just say that the Godiva fudgy brownies are pretty darn good. I'm still planning on mostly baking from scratch, because I think boxed stuff is such a cop-out, but I may just keep a box of these brownies on hand in the future. You know, in case of emergencies.