With so many people moving to health-conscious diets, cookies don't need to be thrown completely out of your diet. Instead, suggest some of the following tips to help make some healthy cookies for your family.
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 flavouring to your cookies. You can select fruits in your cookies that will complement the other flavors, or simply play with different fruits that you will find in the grocery store. Here are several dried fruits that are widely used in cookie baking and can be found on the local market for groceries or farmers:
Cherries
Raisins
Figs
Prunes
Cranberries
2. Think Whole Grains
Fiber is a crucial 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 far healthier wheat flour. And if you add half of the total amount of flour recommended for a whole wheat flour recipe then you make a healthier cookie. The wheat flour will make your cookies denser than they would with all-purpose flour, thereby bringing more nutritional value and just a little better fitting into your diet.
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 you use for making your usual recipe for cookies. Now think of different ingredients that can make your cookies a little healthier, but taste as good as normal. Replacing only a couple of different ingredients will give you a nutritious cookie. Consider adding any of the following ingredients for your safe batch of cookies:
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
Know you have to think 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 simple tips.
