If you’ve been shunning the bakery section of your supermarket for a while, you may not be up on the “two-bite” phenomena. Basically, “two-bite” is brand for an assortment of deserts that come in clear tubs. I’m not sure why they are named “two-bite”, since they are more correctly called “byte-sized”, and if you try to eat them in two bites you get crumbs all over.

I’m a fan of both the brownies and the scones.

Last week I needed to pick some snacks for the meeting, and came across a new “two-bite” produce – a brookie, a combination of a brownie and a chocolate-chip cookie. Sounds great, right?

Yes it does. In fact, it sounds better than it is.

The first problem is the cookie. The essence of a chocolate-chip cookie is something that spreads out, is a bit crunchy and still a bit soft. What you get is a cookie-cake, which everybody knows is not as good as a cookie. The brownie also suffers – it’s dry rather than full of creamy and chocolatey goodness.

Not recommended.

I've used http://www.accelerade.com/mountain berry as a hydration drink for quite some time. It works pretty well, but it has a problem - it's sweetened mostly with sucrose, which means that it's quite sweet. They use some citric acid to counter that a bit, but after a couple of hours it gets too sweet to drink.

Some people dilute it, which makes it less sweet but also reduces the number of calories in a bottle. I prefer to make the existing drink less sweet.

What we need is a sugar that acts like sucrose but is less sweet. Maltodextrain is a complex carbohydrate - a chain of glucose molecules all hooked together (sometimes known as a glucose polymer), and it breaks down to glucose very easily.

I get mine from the supplement house:

My current recipe is 2.5 parts Accelerade to 1 part maltodextrin. I did one batch at 2:1 which is another option.

Recipe:

3 3/4 cups Accelerade (750 grams)
2 1/4 cups Maltodextrin (300 grams)
1 teaspon salt

Put in a big bowl and mix. This amount will fit in one of the small accelerade containers. The amount of salt is slightly more than what it would normally have - if you want to keep the sodium the same, you need 8/10ths of a teaspoon.

This also has less protein - instead of the 4:1 ratio, you're down to something less than that. You could add more whey protein if you wanted.