I was recently asked to help come up with a low-carb dessert for a dieting friend's birthday party. What's with the out-of-control low-carb obsession these days? I mean, it's dessert. Dessert needs sugar. Sugar good. Did you know that if you reduce your serving size of even the sweetest, fattiest dessert by 33%, you eliminate about a third of the calories and carbs? My helpful tip for the day.

Regardless, I was at the grocery store tonight and a popular brand of sucralose, the hip "natural"-ish new sugar substitute, was on sale, so it seemed like a good time to bite. When I got home, I made a batch of chocolate chip cookies from the recipe in The Professional Pastry Chef, only I substituted the 6 oz of granulated sugar in the recipe for the equivalent amount of sucralose. That took a little math. Don't tell the author what I did! I kept the 6 oz of brown sugar and all of the flour. Does that still qualify as low-carb?

The cookies taste pretty good. They didn't spread out into big flat discs like I normally expect chocolate chip cookies to. I want to attribute that to the lack of sugar, but I'm not exactly running a double-blind controlled trial here. Pictures and taste-testing results will follow shortly.