Afternoon Tea the Slimming World Way

Afternoon tea has become quite a craze over the past couple of years and it's something you'd probably want to avoid if you're on a health kick, but for Mothers Day I treat my mum to afternoon tea at my house, the Slimming World way. I got out all my tiered cupcake stands and my nice little cups and saucers and did a bit of baking... just minus the oodles of flour and sugar! Here's how I did it:

The Savouries

- 2 slices from a 400g wholemeal loaf for a HEXB which would get you 4 triangles. The fillings consisted of: salmon and cucumber, roast ham and tomato and egg mayonnaise (with extra light mayo). Not using butter on sandwiches also makes a difference in syn values, a lot of afternoon sea sandwiches will have butter slathered all over them which pushes the syn values higher than you may expect!!

- Short celery sticks with light primula cheese down the middle (80g of Primula for HEXA, that's half the tube!)

- Cherry Tomatoes

The Sweets

A small traditional fruit scone would be 7 syns and if you wanted to go all posh and have a Tesco Finest butter scone, that'd be 13 syns!!! 1 tbsp clotted cream (4 syns) and 1 tsp jam (2 syns) takes it to a very costly affair syns-wise! If you really want a scone I'd suggest just having half of the quantities and you can enjoy a little bit of naughty for a lot less syns!

I did buy a pack of scones, for the benefit of my guests as well as some other naughty bits; the short bread and chocolate tiffin pieces are 7.5 syns each!!!! To stop myself from over indulging on the naughty stuff, I enjoyed treats from two recipes which I found on different blogs and on the Slimming World website...

Lemon Drizzle Fairy Cakes (serves 16) 2.5 syns each

Ingredients

1 Lemon

2 Eggs

50g low fat spread suitable for baking eg. Anchor Spreadable Lighter

6 tbsp artificial sweetener

100g self raising flour

2-3 drops vanilla essence

For the drizzle

8 level teaspoons of icing sugar

Few drops of lemon juice

Couple drops of yellow food colouring

1 tsp icing sugar to dust

Method

Preheat Oven to 180 degrees (gas 4)

Whisk eggs together with low fat spread and sweetener

Sieve in the flour and fold into the mixture with lemon zest and vanilla essence.

Spoon into the 16 cases and bake for 15-20 minutes until firm and golden

Place on a wire rack to cool

To make the lemon drizzle, mix together icing sugar, lemon juice and food colouring to make a spoonable mixture, drizzle it over the top of the cakes and then dust with icing to finish.

Taken from Slimming World Website.

Squidgy Chocolate Loaf (13 syns for whole thing)

Ingredients

6 eggs (separated)

150g Splenda sweetener 

50g cocoa powder (not hot chocolate) (9 syns)

1 tsp vanilla essence

4 tsps sugar (4 syns, optional)

Fry Light

Method

Preheat oven to 180 degrees (gas 4)

Whisk egg whites to soft peak stage

Put egg yolks, Splenda and vanilla essence in a bowl and mix until smooth (add the sugar now if you wish to)

Add the cocoa powder gradually mixing in the cocoa, if the mixture gets too stiff add a little of the egg white

Fold the egg whites into the mixture with a metal spoon, make sure you fold carefully do not just mix it because you need to keep the mixture light and airy.

Spray a loaf tin with fry light and pour the mixture in.

Bake the cake for around 25 minutes until firm but springy, remove from oven and stand to cool (Leave in the tin)

This should make around 20 pieces, which dramatically reduces the syn value of each slice; I also cut each slice in half.

Adapted from a recipe on Slimming Eats

My willing guinea pigs (my mum, nana and grandad) all preferred the chocolate cake to the lemon drizzle cakes, which surprised me. But it also astounded them how many syns they ended up consuming when they had a bit of everything! I ended up eating 15 syns which is my whole allowance for today but it's far better than what I would have eaten if I hadn't have planned it the Slimming World way. It just shows that you can do afternoon tea within your allowance and I can't say that I enjoyed it any less than the really naughty afternoon teas I've had in the past!