100-calorie ways to satisfy your sweet tooth

Make your own snacks

Hundred-calorie snack packs are all the rage on grocery store shelves, with slimmed-down chocolate bars and Lilliputian cookies forming the majority of such portion-controlled fare. But if you want to stay away from the excess packaging and save a little dough, you can easily rustle up your own 100-calorie sweet snacks, whether you’re at home or on the go.

1. Half a cup of hot chocolate made with milk

Nothing rattling around in your cabinet but a packet of hot chocolate mix? Most regular single-serving packages contain approximately 120 calories if made with hot water and 200 calories when made with one-percent milk. You can also make your own hot chocolate from scratch using our Hot Chili Chocolate recipe. To stay at the 100-calorie mark, stick to half a cup.

2. Two Timbits

Doughnuts aren’t a healthy food, but if you just can’t pass by Tim Hortons without a little deep-fried treat to go with your coffee-or when your well-meaning colleague brings in a box of the tempting little doughnut holes-you can at least rein it in at 100 calories. Stick to the honey dip and apple fritter varieties to keep calories on track, as they are 50 calories each. Avoid the denser cake-dough Timbits-think sour cream and old-fashioned types-because they pack up to 90 calories each, almost twice as much as their yeast-dough counterparts.

3. Fruit and cottage cheese

An overenthusiastic enjoyment of dairy products is the downfall of many a well-intentioned snacker. You swear you’ll just have a spoonful of strawberry ice cream or orange-and-vanilla sherbet, and the next thing you know, you’ve eaten two sugar-laden cups of it.

If what you’re really craving is the sweetness of fruit mixed with the creaminess of milk, you can get a 100-calorie hit with half a cup of cottage cheese (or plain low-fat yogurt) and half a cup of fruit, such as oranges, suggests Vancouver-based registered dietitian Jessica Begg of Flourish Nutrition.

4. Four Hershey’s Kisses

Dark chocolate is always endorsed as the optimal chocolate for nutrition, but for some cravings, let’s be frank-only milk chocolate will do. In that case, a petite handful of Hershey’s Kisses can do the trick. These silver-foil-wrapped chocolates are just shy of 25 calories each for the plain milk chocolate type, so you can indulge in exactly four of them for a 100-calorie snack.

5. One cup of blueberries

If you’re in the mood to snack in front of the TV but you need to find a healthy offset for the cookies you scarfed down at work, you could do worse than reaching for a cup of fresh blueberries. Actually, you’ll be snacking on fewer than 100 calories, as each cup contains 80 calories and almost no fat, according to the Blueberry Council, a growers’ association. They’re delightful in terms of nutrition as well, offering vitamins and antioxidants. Plus, it will take a while to nibble through a cup of blueberries, which should enhance your feeling of snack satiety.

6. Chocolate “mousse” yogurt

An easy-to-make suggestion for a healthy-but yummy-100-calorie snack comes from Tristaca Caldwell, a professor at Acadia University in Wolfville, N.S., and a registered dietitian with Fueling with Food. She says to make “mousse” by blending 3/4 cup plain low-fat yogurt, 1 tbsp cocoa, 1 tsp vanilla extract and 1 tsp sugar (or sugar substitute). Or if you’re looking for something store-bought, “Go for half a cup of pudding made with skim milk,” she says.

7. One s’more

If you’re warming up by an open fire (or just at home on a cold night) you can keep this favourite childhood snack to 100 calories by remembering a few simple proportions, says Caldwell. Use only one of each ingredient: One large marshmallow, one square of milk chocolate and one graham cracker. You’ll end up with an open-faced but just-as-delicious s’more.

8. Frozen Popsicle

On the other end of the weather spectrum, when the heat hits you can cool down with a homemade fruit ice-pop that sticks to 100 calories. Caldwell suggests pureeing your fruit of choice and filling a 125 mL container with it, placing a stick in the centre and freezing. Bonus: You’ll also get the benefit of real fruit without any added sugar.

More 100-calorie sweet snack ideas

Begg suggests going for three dried apricots and three walnut halves for a heart-healthy snack, or one small apple and one ounce of skim-milk cheese for a sweet-savoury combo. You can also choose 3/4 cup of applesauce, suggests Caldwell. And when you want candy, she says two pieces of fresh licorice will keep your snack under the 100-calorie mark.

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