With so many people turning to health-conscious lifestyles, cookies don't need to be thrown entirely out of your diet. Instead, find some of the following tips to help make some healthy cookies for your kids.
1. Add Dried Fruit
For recipes that call for chocolate chips or any kind of extra sugar-based additives consider adding in pieces of dried fruit to your cookies. Dried fruits are healthy to consume and contain natural sugars that will still give your cookies a bit of a sweet flavoring. You can choose fruits that will compliment the other flavors in your cookies, or simply experiment with various fruits that you can find at the grocery store. Here are some dried fruits that are commonly used in cookie baking and can be found at your local grocers or farmers market:
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. Even 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 your cookies denser than they would be with all-purpose flour, thereby bringing more nutritional value and just a little better fitting into your diet.Â
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. 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.