I had good intentions of being neighborly and making some cookies for a friend who was going into the hospital today (and extras to keep at home to nibble on, too), but the batch turned out to be a flop. They weren’t sweet enough and were far too crumbly. It was a low-carb recipe for almond cookies that I adapted, since I had peanut butter on hand instead of almond butter, but that wasn’t the problem. I’ve made some really scrumptious low-carb baked goods that you couldn’t tell were low-carb/sugar [at least, I couldn’t tell]. So, I had to get to the bottom of it – what went wrong this time?

I realized two glitches after-the-fact: 1) I’ve baked with Splenda before, but I should have measured a packed cup of the granulated kind, rather than the loose scoop that I used; 2) I recently bought some new whey protein powder (an awesome binding/filler for low-carb recipes!); unfortunately, I didn’t notice that I bought *plain* instead of vanilla. Blech. I didn’t notice it in my smoothie, but I sure could tell the difference in the cookies! I needed to have compensated with a splash of vanilla extract.

Rather than toss the whole batch, I decided to try an experiment. I crumbled the cookies (not a difficult task, since they were already falling apart) and lined the bottom of a baking sheet. Then, I whipped up a box of sugar-free butterscotch pudding – according to the “pie filling” instructions – and poured it evenly over the top. I refrigerated it for a couple of hours and voila … Pudding Crumble:

It was pretty yummy for a salvage effort, if I may say. To do it over again, I still should have added some more Splenda & vanilla, but the crumbles made a sort of graham cracker-ish crust that was surprisingly good. With a bit of tweaking, this could be a guiltless dessert to take for a pot-luck!