By its very nature, a cookie is never going to be the world's healthiest food. Buy a manufactured cookie, and you're treating yourself to a mouthful of refined white sugar and flour, laced with hydrogenated fats. Eat too many of these, and you'll be storing up serious health problems.
But it certainly is possible to make healthy cookie recipes using healthier ingredients, adding more nutrients and still tasting really good.
How to do it? Follow recipes that have been developed to be healthy, like our:
Healthy Oatmeal Cookie Recipe
Healthy Oatmeal Raisin Cookies
Or substitute healthier ingredients into your own favorite cookie recipes - it's easy to do, and the results can be extremely good. Bear in mind that the texture will be softer than the less healthy type of cookies.
? Healthy Eating Made Easy.comFlour Use wholemeal or wholewheat flour instead of the refined white flour in your recipe. If you think the cookies risk being too heavy, look for wholewheat pastry flour, which gives a lighter texture. Use oatmeal Oats are healthy food, being high in soluble fiber which helps to sustain you for longer. Eating oatmeal regularly also helps lower cholesterol. Oats also contain protein as well as useful levels of some vitamins and minerals. What's more they add great flavour, texture and crunch to cookies. You can substitute them for some of the flour in a standard recipe, or try our Healthy Oatmeal Cookie Recipe.
Substituting fats Traditional recipes use butter to give that crisp, short texture. I don't have anything against butter, eaten in moderation, and buy organic butters in preference to manufactured spreads. But butter is high in saturated fat, and if you prefer to stay away from these you can make substitutions. Some healthy cookie recipes will work with an oil, like sunflower, in place of butter or margarine. The texture will be chewy rather than crispy, and the calorie count from fat will still be high.
Another option is to use a fruit puree, often applesauce, instead of fat. This works well, again giving a softer texture. Fruits add some sweetness as well, so you can safely reduce the amount of sugar in your recipe by between 25% and 50%.
Eggs It's possible to use apple puree instead of eggs in a recipe. Lower the fat/calorie content by substituting egg white for whole eggs. If you do use whole eggs, make them organic, free range.
Substitute sugar Traditional recipes usually contain a lot of sugar. Instead of using refined white sugars, you can use unrefined brown sugar, or turbinado sugar (available in the USA and similar to demarara sugar sold in the UK). The difference in nutritional value between these and refined sugar is negligible, as they contain only a little molasses and are still high in calories. I never recommend using artificial sweeteners in recipes. They don't work well in baked recipes and contain chemicals which your body doesn't need.
A better approach is to experiment with reducing the amount of sugar you use in a recipe. You can often remove up to one-third of the sugar in a standard recipe and still end up with a cookie that has a good texture and tastes good and sweet. You may need to add a little more liquid to the mix, to prevent the lower-sugar cookies being dry. You can also substitute up to 25% of sugar in any recipe with powdered milk.
Another alternative is to use fruit purees like apple or pineapple to add sweetness to your healthy cookies. You can substitute the entire quantity of sugar with the same amount of fruit puree, but the finished cookie will be considerably less sweet. Adding sweet ingredients like raisins can help here.
Add healthy ingredients As well as making healthier substitutes in your cookie recipes, it's good to add extra ingredients that can up the nutritional value. If you're making choc chip cookies, use only dark chocolate chips with a high cocoa content. Include nuts in recipes (remembering that they contain fat, and so raise the calorie count), and dried fruits such as chopped apricots, sultanas or raisins. Cinnamon is a healthy spice, which adds a delicious flavour and sweetness.
Make your cookies smaller It's not realistic to expect your family to stop eating sweet foods completely, but what you may need to do is reduce the amount they eat. You can do this easily if you make your own cookies, by making each cookie smaller...simple, but effective.
Keep cookies out of sight (and out of reach of children) and eat them only at set times - ideally at the end of a healthy dinner or as part of a kid's lunch box.
Don't use cookies as a readily available snack food, to be grazed on at will.
Use our healthy cake recipes and healthy cookie recipes whenever you're baking for your family.
Did your family love it? Did you change it around? Did it taste good? Please share...
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