SUBJECT: HEALTHY EATING 

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 amazing. Fathoming can be a little complicated, but there are healthier ingredients and alternatives that can be added to cookies so they retain their flavour, so they are not as bad for you. Implementing quick improvements in your current recipe for family cookies will help you stick to your diet and give you the little bit of sweetness you want to make for your next meal.

With so many people turning to health conscious lifestyles, cookies do not have to be thrown out of your diet entirely. Instead consider some of the following tips to help make your family some healthier cookies.

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 healthy to consume and contain natural sugars that will still give some sweet flavouring to your cookies. You can select fruits that complement the other flavors in your cookies, or you can easily play with various fruits you can find in the grocery store. Here are several dried fruits widely used in cookie baking and can be found on the market of your local supermarkets or farmer's market:

Cherries

Raisins

Figs

Prunes

Cranberries

2. Think Whole Grains

Fiber is an important part of a healthy diet, so why not incorporate fiber into your cookies? Replace your all-purpose flour with much healthier wheat flour when baking your cookies from scratch. Even if you replace half of the entire flour amount that is recommended for a recipe with whole wheat flour then you are making a healthier cookie. The wheat flour will make your cookies denser than they would be with all-purpose flour, thus carrying more nutritional value and fitting into your diet just a little bit better.

Another trick that some bakers use to add nutritional value to cookies is adding oats to the mixture. The oats will give the cookie a crunchy texture and can add additional fiber to your cookies.

3. Substitute your other Ingredients

Think of all the ingredients that you use to make your typical cookie recipe. Now, think of better ingredients that can make your cookies just a little healthier but taste as good as they are normally. The replacement of just a few different ingredients you can make a healthy cookie. Consider some of the following ingredient replacements for your healthy cookie batch:

Replace the oil and butter from your cookie recipe with applesauce

Replace eggs with an egg substitute or even just egg whites

Replace milk chocolate chips with semi-sweet chocolate pieces instead

Replace white sugar with sucanat (sugar cane) or stevia

Remember that if you want to get healthy, you have to think and make healthy food. With these simple tips you can transform what would otherwise be an unhealthy, sugar-filled, fattening cookie into a healthier, lightly sweetened cookie snack.

FILED UNDER: HEALTHY RECIPES