Wednesday Eats: Mesiahnic Desserts

Our friends over at Baristanet.com have been going gaga about the “near celebrity-status” toffee and cheesecake made by Montclair healthy eating guru Nicky Mesiah.

We thought, “‘healthy,’ ‘toffee’ and ‘cheesecake’ all in the same sentence?”

So when she emailed us after she read our cheesecake story last week, inviting us to Montclair for a taste…well, put it this way: we did not say No.

Nicky conducts lectures and workshops about healthy eating at the Montclair Adult School, at the local Y, and at other places in this food-obsessed, restaurant-rich town. She is also an event planner (www.mesiaheventplanners.com) who will cater your party from soup to nuts, literally. 

But it’s healthy desserts that’s her specialty. Low-carb, sugar free, low-fat or fat-free. Several recipes have butter and some do have sugar, but there’s no shortening or trans-fat, and she never  uses the industrial poison known as high fructose corn syrup.

The existence of “healthy desserts” is, theoretically, not a physical impossibility. In practice, though, how do Nicky’s healthy cheesecakes and toffee keep food-savvy Montclairites coming back?

Because they taste very good to great. The low-fat crustless cheesecake is moist, with a spicy twist that keeps the sugar-free sweetness out of cloyness territory. It’s not as dense as less healthy cheesecake but hey, this is just 3.75 fat grams per slice.

The toffee is so good you can’t believe it’s good for you. Nicky makes maple pecan toffee, cashew toffee, almond toffee. She uses whole nuts, not the ground-up stuff in commercial toffee.

You can get the toffee in a nice gift box (12-15 pieces for $10, or 25-30 pieces for $20) at the Spice it Up shop in Montclair, or order it from Nicky’s website. Want the cheesecake? Online is the only way to get it.

With Passover coming up, she’s also making charoset toffee: raisins, dried cherries, nuts, cinnamon, chocolate. You don’t have to be Jewish to love it. Or to wish she made it year ‘round.

Tags: Dessert | health food

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