About Feeding My Addiction
Jamie Hollis writes and tests every recipe on Feeding My Addiction. The starting question is almost always the same: can this taste as good as the version with twice the sugar? Most of the time, with enough trial and error, the answer turns out to be yes.
The recipes fall into three groups. Protein-forward treats swap in oats, protein powder, and nut butters where a recipe would normally lean on flour and refined sugar. Sugar-free baking swaps rework classic bakes (apple pie, shortbread, snickerdoodles) around sweeteners and ratios that hold together without a cup of white sugar doing the structural work.
Decorated sugar cookie designs cover the slower, more meditative side of things: royal icing consistency, piping technique, and the specific patience required to get a clean outline before it skins over.
Most weekends the kitchen runs both tracks at once — a batch of something high-protein chilling in the fridge while a tray of cookies waits for its icing to set. The two disciplines share surprisingly little except a sink full of dishes and the same stubborn insistence on a second test batch.
Nothing here went up on a single batch. Some of the substitutions on this site took four or five attempts to get right; a few never made it past attempt two and quietly got dropped.
Nutrition figures on each recipe card are calculated from the specific brands and quantities listed in that recipe; treat them as close estimates, since your exact ingredients will shift the numbers a little.
How Recipes Get Developed
Every recipe starts as a “what if” scribbled during someone else’s dessert. What if shortbread worked without butter? What if a cake pop survived a lunchbox? The notebook currently holds more failures than the site holds successes, which is exactly the ratio honest testing produces.
Development follows the same loop every time: a first batch to find the idea, a second batch on a different day to confirm it, and a third if anything between the two disagreed. Ovens drift, humidity meddles with oat flour, and a recipe that only worked once is a coincidence, not a recipe.
Nutrition numbers get calculated from the specific brands and quantities in the final tested version. They are close estimates rather than laboratory results, and the recipe cards say so plainly.
The Test Kitchen, Honestly
There is no industrial mixer and no walk-in pantry — just a standard home oven with a hot back-left corner, a food processor old enough to vote, and a drawer of piping tips organized by optimism rather than size.
That is deliberate. A recipe tested on professional equipment quietly assumes professional equipment. Everything here has to work in the same kind of kitchen it will actually be baked in, interruptions and all.
What This Site Cares About
Three things, in order. Taste first: a healthy dessert that needs an apology is a failed dessert. Honesty second: real times, real macros, documented failure points. Practicality third: short ingredient lists built from staples a normal pantry already holds.
What it deliberately avoids: miracle-ingredient trends, sponsored enthusiasm, and the word “guilt” applied to food that is, after all, dessert. One exception on that last point survives in a recipe title from the site’s early days — proof the standards evolved too.
About the Name
Reader questions shaped more of this collection than any editorial calendar did. Several recipes on this site exist because someone asked whether a swap could work, and the honest answer required flour on the counter to find out. Where a recipe here leaves a question open, the contact address below is the shortest route to an answer.
The addiction in question is baking itself — the compulsion to fix a recipe that almost worked, one more batch, one more tweak. Feeding it is cheaper than therapy and produces cookies. It seemed only fair the site should own that honestly from the masthead down.
Get in Touch
Questions about a recipe, a substitution that isn’t behaving, or a cookie design you’d like to see covered? Email [email protected] and you’ll get a reply as soon as the oven timer allows.