Adding Fruits and Vegetables to Desserts and Baked Goods for More Vitamin Power

Want to learn how to make desserts healthier, with more vitamins? I have some free nutritionist/health coach tips for helping you make all of your desserts and baked goods just a little bit healthier.

Nutritious Dessert Additions: Fruit and Vegetables

Adding fruits and vegetables add beneficial nutrients to our desserts. You can easily add some canned or baked pumpkin, sweet potato, butternut squash to recipes to add vitamin A.

In any quick bread recipe (that uses baking powder and soda instead of yeast), just add some of the above cooked and puréed additions to the liquid measure with the milk, for instance. Then pour the milk over the puréed squash or pumpkin until it measures the same liquid, or just a little more, that you need in the recipe. (Try it this way. If its still too dry, add a bit more liquid next time.)

I was able to add about one tablespoon canned pumpkin to my homemade hot cocoa, and it was delicious! For anyone who doesn’t like pumpkin, I could hardly taste it. (I make it dairy-free with 1/2 coconut milk and half water, but follow the cocoa box recipe.)

In the past I was able to mix cooked and puréed butternut squash with peanut butter, and serve it to a very picky eater as a PB&J sandwich. No fuss!

Canned Sweet Potato in Recipes:

Canned sweet potato has 390% of a person’s daily vitamin A in just half a cup!! Also, 26% of your vitamin C (but I don’t think that vitamin C survives the heating process during canning or cooking.) That half a cup is the same as 8 tablespoons. So imagine a quick bread that had about eight slices in it, where you used half a cup of sweet potato. That would mean you added almost 50% of your vitamin A to each of those 8 slices!! See how cool that is?! It’s a really easy way to add vitamins, right?

Sweet potato purée, vitamin content in sweet potato canned, vitamin A content, vitamin c content, sweet potato in baked goods — **Nutrition Information and Vitamins for Canned Sweet Potato** (Transform Health 2019)

Canned Pumpkin Purée in Recipes:

Now let’s talk about canned pumpkin: It has 250% of a person’s daily requirement for vitamin A in just half a cup. That means using only one tablespoon in any way adds over 31% of your vitamin A needs. Half a cup also has 6% iron. How about using it on toast mixed with peanut butter, or just on half the toast, or in hot cocoa?

Pumpkin purée vitamin content, pumpkin pie puree nutrition information, vitamin A, iron content, calcium content, vitamin C content, purée pumpkin in baked goods, — **Nutrition Information and Vitamins for Canned Pumpkin Puree** (Transform Health 2019)

How to Add Other Fruits and Vegetables to Baked Good and Dessert Recipes:

You could also add frozen or fresh blueberries, cherries, fresh spinach (washed), puréed or chunk peaches, cooked carrot purée, and cooked beet to the recipe. These all have their own vitamins, plus their intense colors show that they contain antioxidants. These are wonderful to get into our diet because we all make free radicals called oxidants (boo) during energy production (a normal process), and we get them from eating fried foods, too. The free radicals can cause cell damage if not checked by antioxidants.

Antioxidant colorful fruits and vegetables combat free radicals in the human body, herbal medicine, alternative medicine, betalain alkaloids, how to add vitamins to baked goods and desserts, how to add vitamin A to desserts and baked goods — **Colorful and dark fruits and vegetables add antioxidants to foods, and help us combat free radical damage from eating fried foods and normal energy production processes.**

How to Prepare Added Fruits and Vegetables in Baked Goods

I would suggest blending one of the above great foods with some of the liquid called for in the recipe. If the recipe calls for 1 cup milk, put some cherries into the liquid measure. Then add milk over them until it measures 1 milk or a little bit over (1-2TB). Then blend these two in your favorite “macerator.” The recipe could need a little more liquid than 1 cup because some of the fruit is solid. Just watch the bread while cooking – it might take the same amount of time or a little longer. Just see if its done with a toothpick, or watch for the edges to pull in a bit from the pan’s edge. That shows the center is nearly cooked through.

Using cooked beet is more like carb. You might need to use it in place of some of the flour measure, instead of the liquid. I haven’t tried this yet.

**Carrots can be used in recipes if cooked and pureed.**

A Note About Food Allergens:
If someone doesn’t like a vegetable, gags on it when hidden in foods, or gets a rash from it, it’s better NOT to use it. This is a sign that the person is reacting to the food, maybe not as an immune response, but still – the body isn’t happy! The food is making the body react in a negative way, and that uses up needless energy.

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And if you liked this post, check out two more articles, Healthy Things to Add to Waffles and Pancakes, and Black Bean Brownies from a Box Mix. Thanks!

Sources/ Bibliography:

“20 Foods that Are High In Vitamin A” from
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/foods-high-in-vitamin-a#section1