Although making a healthier cookie may not sound as appealing as eating a cookie filled with sugars, fats, or sweet candy, a healthy cookie can be made that still tastes good. Fathoming may be a little complicated, but some healthier ingredients and alternatives can be added to cookies so they retain their flavor, so they are not as bad for you. Implementing small improvements in your current recipe for family cookies will help you stick to your diet and give you the little bit of sugar you want to make for your next meal.
With so many people moving to health-conscious lifestyles, cookies don’t need to be thrown completely out of your diet. Alternatively, find some of the following tips to help make some healthy cookies for your kids.
1. Add Dried Fruit
For recipes that include chocolate chips or other extra sugar-based ingredients, consider adding to your cookies pieces of dried fruit. Dried fruits are safe to eat and contain natural sugars that will still give some sweet flavoring to your cookies. You can select fruits that complement the other flavors in your cookies, or you can simply play with various fruits you can find in the grocery store. Here are some dried fruits widely used in cookie baking and can be found on the market of your local grocery or farmers:
Cherries
Raisins
Figs
Prunes
Cranberries
2. Think Whole Grains
Fiber is an important part of a balanced diet, so why not include fiber in your cookies? When baking your cookies from scratch, replace your all-purpose meal with much healthier wheat flour. But if you substitute half of the total amount of flour recommended for a whole wheat flour recipe then you make a healthier cookie.
The wheat flour makes the cookies denser than they would be with all-purpose flour, thereby providing more nutritious value and just a little more fitting into the diet.
The addition of oats to the mixture is another trick some bakers use to add nutritional value to cookies. The oats will give a crunchy texture to the cookie and can add extra fiber to your cookies.
3. Replace other Ingredients
Think of all the ingredients used to produce the standard recipe for cookies. Now think of different ingredients that can make your cookies a little safer but taste as good as normal. Replacing only a few different ingredients that you can turn into a balanced cookie. Find any of the following alternative ingredients for your safe batch of cookies:
Remove the oil and butter from your applesauce cookie recipe
Replace eggs with an egg replacement or sometimes only egg whites
Replace milk chocolate chips with half-sweet bits of chocolate instead
Replace white sugar with succinate or stevia (sugar cane).
Remember you have to remember and make good food if you want to get better. You can turn what would otherwise be an unhealthy, sugar-filled, fattening cookie into a balanced, lightly sweetened cookie snack with these easy tips.