Cookies do not have to be thrown out of your diet altogether, with too many people turning to health-conscious diets. Instead, think of some of the following ideas to help make some healthy cookies for your family.
1. Add Dried Fruit
For recipes that require chocolate chips or some form of extra sugar-based ingredients, try adding your cookies to pieces of dried fruit. Dried fruits are safe to eat and contain natural sugars that still add a little sweet flavoring to your cookies. In your cookies, you can select fruits that complement the other flavors or just play with different fruits that you can find at the grocery store. Here are some dried fruits widely used in cookie baking and that can be found on the market of your local grocers or farmers:
Cherries
Raisins
Figs
Prunes
Cranberries
2. Think Whole Grains
Fiber is an integral part of a balanced diet, so why not add the cookies with fiber? When baking your cookies from scratch, replace your all-purpose flour with much more nutritious wheat flour. And if you add half of the average amount of flour prescribed for a whole wheat flour recipe, you're making a better cookie. The wheat flour will make the cookies denser than they will be with all-purpose flour, adding more nutritious content and working just a little bit more into your diet.
Adding oats to the mixture is another trick which some bakers use to add nutritional value to cookies. The oats can provide a crunchy feel to the cookie and will add extra fiber to your cookies.
3. Substitute your other Ingredients
Dream of all the ingredients you use to create your usual recipe for cookies. Now, suggest better ingredients that can only make the cookies a bit healthier, but taste as delicious as they always are. A nutritious cookie can be made by removing only a few different ingredients. For your balanced cookie batch, consider any of the following ingredient substitutions:
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
Understand that you need to think and make good food if you want to become healthy. You can transform what would otherwise be an unhealthy, sugar-filled, fattening cookie into a nutritious, softly sweetened cookie snack with these quick tips.
