Tag Archives: cookies

chocolate chip cookies

5 Delectable Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipes

by baking, chocolate, grains, oats, recipes, snacks, , ,

It's Chocolate Chip Cookie Week!  And if you've been following me for a while you'll know that I love cookies (in moderation of course). There's just something really satisfying about a good cookie. 

In order to celebrate, I rounded up some of my friends and asked them to share their favorite Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe (who knew there were so many variations?).

With these options, you're sure to find one that's going to become your new favorite!

No-Flour Cookie Dough

If you're seeing news blurbs about cookie dough and feeling a sense of nostalgia (and a desire to make cookies just so you can eat the dough) consider making my No-Flour Cookie Dough. Just be aware that this recipe does not bake into cookies, it's meant to be enjoyed raw.
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Ingredients
  

  • 1 can chickpeas, drained
  • 1/2 cup creamy almond butter
  • 1 tablespoon evaporated cane juice
  • 1 tablespoon maple syrup
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • generous pinch sea salt
  • 1/2 cup chocolate chips

Instructions
 

  • Combine the first five ingredients in a food processor until mixed well
  • Scoop into a bowl and add chocolate chips by hand
  • Spoon into ramekins or mini-muffin cups and chill 2 hours before serving or enjoy with a spoon straight out of the bowl

Guilt-Free 3-Ingredient Chocolate Chip Cookie

This recipe from my good friend Andrea Green, the Natural Green Mom, is made mainly from bananas and oatmeal, making it healthy enough to serve as a breakfast cookie.
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Prep Time 5 minutes
Cook Time 15 minutes
Servings 8 cookies

Ingredients
  

  • 2 ripe bananas
  • 1 cup rolled oats
  • 1/3 cup chocolate chips

Instructions
 

  • Preheat oven to 350.
  • Mash ripe bananas.
  • Stir in oatmeal and chocolate chips until well combined.
  • Divide dough into 8 equal cookies on a greased cookie sheet.
  • Bake 15 minutes.
  • Remove from oven and cool on a cooling rack.

20-Minute Oatmeal Peanut-Butter Chocolate-Chip Cookies

The honey and coconut sugar combo worked like a charm for this recipe by my friend Beth Ricci! “They were in fine cookie form – round, fluffy, and moist. Chewy, but not crumbly. Just enough chocolate chips to make each bite heavenly.”
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Ingredients
  

  • ½ cup honey
  • ¾ cups coconut palm sugar
  • ¼ cup butter at room temperature
  • 1 cup natural peanut butter
  • 1.5 teaspoons baking soda
  • 2 eggs
  • 1 teaspoon whole chia seeds
  • 3¼ cups quick oats1 cup chocolate chips

Instructions
 

  • Place honey, coconut palm sugar, and butter in a bowl, and beat until smooth.
  • Add peanut butter, baking soda, eggs, and chia seeds. Mix well with an electric mixer.
  • Mix in oats.
  • Stir in chocolate chips (or use the mixer if yours is powerful enough. I used my hand mixer and it was fine).
  • Drop by spoonful onto parchment paper-lined baking sheet.
  • Bake at 350F for 10 minutes or until golden brown.
  • Let sit for one minute on the pan before removing it to a cooling rack - they are less prone to breaking that way.
  • Once cooled, freeze half of the cookies for a rainy day. Otherwise, they'll all be gone by morning!

Grainless Chocolate Chip Cookies

“Who would have ever thought that chocolate chip cookies without white flour and sugar or eggs, could taste so good?” Well, my good friend and colleague Dr. Cheryl Winter made this recipe possible.
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Ingredients
  

  • 2 cups almond flour (I either use Bob’s Red Mill or I process my own almonds to make my own almond flour)
  • 1/4 cup coconut oil
  • 3 tbsp maple syrup
  • 1/4 tsp sea salt
  • 1/2 tsp baking soda
  • 2 tsp vanilla extract
  • 8 tbsp dark chocolate chips

Instructions
 

  • Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
  • In a medium bowl, whisk together almond meal, salt, and baking soda, then add the coconut oil, maple syrup, and vanilla extract. Mix well.
  • Fold in the dark chocolate chips, then drop batter by a rounded tablespoon onto a baking sheet lined with parchment paper.
  • Bake for 10-15 minutes at 350 degrees F, until the edges are golden brown.
  • Allow to cool on the pan for 10 minutes, then serve warm or allow to cool to room temperature.

Polka Dot Balls

This recipe by another good friend and colleague, Shawn Borup of Show Me Healthy Living, includes ingredients that are superfoods -- quinoa, flax, and oats. This different take on chocolate chip cookies deserves a recommendation, as it is high in fiber and protein and can truly satisfy your sweet tooth.
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Prep Time 15 minutes

Ingredients
  

  • 2 cups cooked organic quinoa(soaked overnight, drain and rinse)**
  • 1⁄2 cup organic peanut, almond, or sunflower butter
  • 1⁄4 cup local raw honey
  • 1 cup organic regular rolled oats
  • 1⁄4 cup golden flax meal
  • 1⁄4 cup carob chips, Equal Exchange or Enjoy Lifechocolate chips

Instructions
 

  • Put quinoa in the pan and cover with 13⁄4 cups filtered water.
  • Bring to a boil. Reduce heat to low and cover.
  • Cook for 10 minutes or until water is absorbed.
  • Remove from heat and let cool.
  • Combine cooked quinoa, peanut butter, and honey in a large bowl and mix.
  • Pulse oats in a blender to make them a bit finer.
  • Stir in oats, flax meal, and chocolate or carob chips.
  • Put the dough in the refrigerator for 30 minutes.
  • Grease baking sheet with organic coconut oil.
  • Use a large melon baller and put Tbsp. balls on the baking sheet.
  • Bake at 325◦F for 18 minutes
  • Makes 20-24 balls.

Notes

Note: To soak and sprout quinoa, put 1⁄2 cup of quinoa in a bowl and cover with 1 cup of filtered water. Let soak 8-12 hours. Drain and rinse. Spread into a colander over a bowl and cover with a light towel. Rinse twice a day and let sprout for about 24 hours or until little tails are the same size as the seed.
 

Do you want more free healthy recipes? Read more on my blog or purchase my ebooks to get in-depth knowledge on how to #readthelabel and understand what’s really IN your food. 

three cookie syndrome

Three Cookie Syndrome

by change, habits, weight

We're just past the holiday season and a lot of people are re-examining their eating habits. As I'm working with clients we have one habit that they all seem to be engaging in so I wanted to take a moment to address it.

It's a phenomenon that hits our subconscious when we are eating, especially when we are eating treats of some kind.

I call it the three cookie syndrome. It goes something like this:

  •  you decide to eat cookies 
  •  you open the package of cookies and see a serving size is two cookies 
  •  you eat three cookies 
  •  a little overwhelmed you say to yourself, “what the hell, I ate three cookies.” and then go on to finish the entire sleeve (or half a box, or some overwhelming percentage of the package).

For many people this is the beginning of the downward spiral that can signal the end of a diet or a change to eating plans. They give up, feeling that they are a failure, and feed themselves negative emotions and messages while not paying attention to their eating.

Breaking the Cycle

cookies

Rather than allowing the consumption of an entire sleeve of cookies (admittedly not the best choice) to overwhelm us it is more constructive to simply acknowledge that we have veered off the path of our eating plan.

Instead of wallowing in guilt or other negative feelings we need to remind ourselves that it's not an all or nothing proposition.  

We can start again to rebuild our nutritional plan and to focus on making healthy choices. Sometimes that focus can come in the middle of that sleeve of cookies. Sometimes it happens immediately afterwards, more often it happens the next day.

Embracing Healthy Choices

Eating well, eating to nourish and support our bodies means loving and accepting ourselves. Garfield says “Diet is die with a t on the end of it.” Rather than looking at our desire to change our food choices as a diet it does help to look at it as a nutritional plan. To remember that we are choosing to make different choices because those choices are supportive for our bodies.

For those who have an illness such as celiac disease, or a food sensitivity, eating those foods brings a fairly immediate negative body response. So we don't do that.

For those who are choosing to make changes, it sometimes happens gradually. However it's never too late to start to make those changes.

Simply remember what the goal is and why you are making these choices.  Treat yourself with loving kindness and take it one step at a time.

 

Baking With Kids

by baking, oats, recipes, sweeteners,

Baking is wonderful and something I love to do. Even more fun is to bake with kids.  They're so excited and fascinated by the process.  Learning their way around the ingredients, how to measure, the wet and dry combining process; it's a fun edible science and math experiment in the kitchen.

This is one of my baking buddies, Miss A.  She came over the other day with her brother, Mr. C.   I had promised them that the next time they came over we would make cookies so that was our plan.

As it turns out Mr. C's idea of making cookies was to allow his sister and I to do all the baking while he played the part of Official Cookie Tester.  And, might I add, he was rather impatient for those cookies to be done.

Miss A and I got down to business, put on our aprons and got out my "Famous Chocolate Chip Oaties" recipe.  Mr. C. wanted to know why they were famous, had they been on t.v.? Did someone famous invent them?  I told him that it was a recipe I had created and I simply call them Famous because everyone who eats them really likes them and wants more.

Needless to say he was less than impressed and informed me that unless they've been on t.v. they can't be famous.  Maybe I should send a box to Ellen?

One of the things I love about baking with kids is how curious they are.  Miss A wanted to taste everything.  Of course we decided that the chocolate chips were pretty tasty. Surprisingly she liked the oatmeal, even raw, and requested a large spoonful of her own to nibble on.  We had two kinds of sugar and she tasted both of them.  Then we got to the baking soda.  

Miss A asked if she could taste it.  I was a little surprised and said, "I'm not sure you want to do that."

"Why?" she asked.

"Well," I replied "it's a little bitter tasting and I'm not sure you're going to like it."

"But I want to taste everything." she said.
So I let her taste it.

Her face scrunched up a little and she said, "It's not really bitter but I don't like it."

"Want some chocolate chips to wash that down?" I asked.

Of course the answer was yes.

We wound up making two batches of cookies the regular variety and the peanut butter variety.  The recipe is below and we're sure you're going to enjoy it, just like we did.

Famous Chocolate Chip Oaties

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Ingredients
  

  • 1/2 C butter
  • 1 C evaporated cane juice crystals
  • 1 egg
  • 1/2 t. vanilla
  • 1 C + 2 T white whole wheat flour
  • 1/2 t. salt
  • 1/2 t. baking soda
  • 1 C chocolate chips
  • 1 C rolled oats

Instructions
 

  • Preheat oven to 375
  • Blend together butter and sugar until creamy
  • Add egg and blend well
  • Add vanilla and blend well
  • Mix together flour, salt and baking soda and sift into butter mixture
  • Blend in chocolate chips
  • Blend in oats
  • Drop by spoonfuls onto a greased baking sheet
  • Bake 10 minutes
  • Let sit on baking sheet 2 minutes
  • Move to rack to finish cooling
  • For the Peanut Butter variety:
    Substitute sucanat for the evaporated cane juice crystals
    Add 1/2 C chunky peanut butter

Gluten-Free Coconut Almond Cookie

by baking, gluten free, nuts, questions, recipes

My friend Helene recently shared a wonderful gluten-free cookie recipe with me. She said it was so fabulous that she was going to have to freeze the cookies, otherwise she was afraid she might eat them all. Frozen cookies have never stopped me, sometimes they are even better that way.

While we were talking Helene also asked if there were any eggs in shortbread. The answer is no.

Shortbread is a particular type of cookie that has a 1-2-3 recipe. One part sweetener (usually sugar), two parts butter (or other shortening), three parts flour (although old-fashioned shortbread was and is made with oats) and then enhanced with flavorings and or spices. The "short" refers to the crumbly dough. Fat retards gluten so even if you used wheat flour, the high amount of fat would prevent the dough from forming long gluten strands.

Helene's Coconut Almond Cookies:

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Ingredients
  

  • 1 c. coconut Flour
  • 1 1/2 c. Almond Meal
  • 1/2 tsp salt
  • 1/2 c. butter
  • 1/4 c. honey
  • 1 Tbsp Almond Extract

Instructions
 

  • Mix the dough together in a cuisinart until a ball forms
  • Freeze dough for approximately 30 mins
  • Preheat oven to 350 deg F
  • Roll dough between two sheets of was paper
  • Cut cookies using a cookie or biscuit cutter
  • Bake for 7 mins, remove to wire rack to cool

Shortbread cookies are typically baked low and slow so they will be very light in color. They can be formed in long rectangles, also called fingers, large circles which are cut into triangles as soon as they are removed from the oven, or small round biscuits. Although most people think of them as Christmas cookies, shortbread can also be made savory (such as this Parmesan Shortbread from Epicurious).