This post is a few days late in coming, as Heather and I attempted the pies over the weekend.
As we have been marching ever closer to Thanksgiving, and holidays in general, Heather and I had talked about wanting to try making a pumpkin pie. They seem like they should be fairly low in sugar, and pretty easy to make.
we shopped around a little for recipes, and got the advice “just use the one on the back of the can of pumpkin pie filling” so that’s what we did 🙂
The only problem was it called for a cup of sugar, shattering our hopes of a low-sugar pie. Our solution was to make two pies, one by the recipe, and one using splenda.
as you can see from the picture (click on the picture for a much larger version), the texture and color of the filling was drastically different using the two sweeteners. I know they sell a version of slpenda for baking that has some brown sugar mixed in, and I think this might be a domain where it would help out, darkening the color etc.
we tried the pies the same day we baked them, after letting them cool in the fridge for a few hours. They didn’t taste the same, but neither one tasted clearly better. I saved a slice of the splenda pie to try after 24 more hours, probably should have saved some of each to really compare. My theory is that splenda starts to taste stronger over time. With nothing to compare to, the slice of pie I saved for another day still tasted pretty good, and certainly didn’t leave any of that diet-soda esque aftertaste that splenda sometimes causes. (If you were wondering, the rest of the pies went to work with Heather).
-Jordan
Nelsons 