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Any bakers? Trying to make a cookie recipe more healthy...

CJ2008

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I've been on a healthy kick lately, and trying out different recipes...

I want to try to make vanilla wafers (I know cookies aren't healthy, but, you know, you still have to have cookies once in a while!) :cheeky: ...but want to make them healthier.

I am trying to drastically reduce the sugar in my diet...so I want to try to see about making these with as little sugar as possible and see if we still like them.

But I want to run the changes by someone who bakes all the time to see if any of what I intend to do would change the flavor or texture so significantly that the end result won't even resemble a cookie or a vanilla wafer ::)

1/2 cup butter, softened
1 cup white sugar ( I was thinking of replacing this with unsweetened apple sauce. Or maybe do 1/4 cup white sugar, 3/4 cup apple sauce?
1 egg
1 tablespoon vanilla extract

1 1/3 cups all-purpose flour I was thinking of replacing this with whole wheat flour. Or should I maybe do 1/2 cup wheat, the rest white?
3/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt

Directions:
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C).
2. Beat butter and sugar in a mixing bowl with an electric mixer until light and fluffy; beat in egg and vanilla extract. Combine flour, baking powder, and salt in a bowl and mix the dry ingredients thoroughly into butter mixture. Drop cookies about 2 inches apart, 1 teaspoon at a time, onto ungreased baking sheets.
3. Bake in the preheated oven until edges of cookies are golden brown, 12 to 15 minutes. Cool cookies on wire racks.

Thanks all! :wavey:
 

marymm

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Re: Any bakers? Trying to make a cookie recipe more healthy.

1/2 cup butter, softened - try 1/4 cup butter and just-less-than 1/4 cup canola or vegetable oil
1 cup white sugar - try 1/2 cup sugar and 1/2 cup unsweetened applesauce or even 1/2 cup pureed dates or apricots
1 egg
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1-1/3 cups all-purpose flour - try 2/3 cup white, 2/3 cup wheat
3/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt

be sure to first beat the butter and oil together, then add the sugar/applesauce - the rest should be per the original recipe. Make sure you check on the cookie batch in the oven a good 5 minutes before they're supposed to be done - tweaking ingredients can change baking time.

After you make the recipe with these change, see how you like the finished product - taste-wise, it may be you can further reduce the sugar and increase the applesauce, or maybe you'd like to increase/lessen the wheat flour. And, if the finished cookie spreads too much, next time you may want to adjust the butter/oil ratio so there's a bit more butter.

I often make the above substitutions in baking; they're are pretty straight-forward especially when going with a 50% substitution. It can get tricky once you are substituting 100% of an ingredient with something that is not like kind (meaning, applesauce or pureed dates in place of sugar as opposed to brown sugar for white).

Good luck and have fun with healthy baking!
 

JulieN

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Re: Any bakers? Trying to make a cookie recipe more healthy.

the thing is cookies have very little liquid in them. Applesauce is a lot of water.
 

bluegirl123

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Re: Any bakers? Trying to make a cookie recipe more healthy.

I quite often half the sugar in my baking with no consequence as I'm used to not very sweet baked goods. As julie pointed out applesauce has a lot of water so I would not sub if, but just decrease the sugar.
 

partgypsy

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Re: Any bakers? Trying to make a cookie recipe more healthy.

If you add that much applesauce it will change the recipe. i would simply reduce sugar by half. Or add some stevia powder to replace.

As far as whole wheat flour, try the "white" whole wheat (little lighter). For things like oatmeal and chocolate chip cookies, i've
replaced up to half the white flour with whole wheat and people not really noticing the difference.
but for a sugar type cookie, I would replace no more than 1/4 of the flour amount. Any amount of whole wheat flour, you will slightly need to increase liquid (water, oil, egg, etc). Or replace some of flour portion with ground nuts makes a butter cookie recipe more crisp and also reduces glycemic index.

The best success with "no sugar" bars I've had are basically what I call my banana cookies which taste like soft cereal bars (add things like applesauce, smooshed bananas, also orange juice) and dried fruit, or fig or date bars in which the filling is either pureed and cooked dates or pureed and cooked figs both cooked in orange juice. They also taste good with chopped walnuts in the filling too.
They both have a slight sweetness but do not taste like what most people consider a cookie taste like, but they hit that urge when you need a carbohydrate fix.
 

TooPatient

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Re: Any bakers? Trying to make a cookie recipe more healthy.

I routinely cut the sugar in half when I do cookies. I also cut the butter (in some recipes -- some don't work well) by a quarter to a third and use vegan buttery sticks (I like Earth Balance vegan buttery sticks) instead of real butter.

I don't add applesauce to cookies. Too wet. In order to get that to work, you'd need a cake-like cookie that calls for milk and maybe even veggie oil. In a case like that, you can reduce the milk & oil and swap in applesauce pretty well.

Re: flour
I haven't used the whole wheat in cookies before, but I did grind up oatmeal and use that in place of about 1/3 of the flour. Worked out just fine. DH didn't even know I had done that.
 

April20

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Re: Any bakers? Trying to make a cookie recipe more healthy.

If you have a Whole Foods near you, there's a good no-cal sweetener called Swerve that they sell (you can also buy it online). Not cheap by any means, but not full of chemicals like many of the alternative sweeteners. I've used it to make cookies and it works well. No funky taste.
 

baby monster

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Re: Any bakers? Trying to make a cookie recipe more healthy.

Typically apple sauce replaces eggs in a recipe for those allergic to eggs. As others pointed out, the extra liquid will make cookies runny if only subbing for sugar. Also, if you're using sweetened apple sauce, it's just more sugar or corn syrup depending on brand. If using unsweetened apple sauce, it won't provide much sweetness. I usually cut sugar in half anyway because I find most baked goods overly sweet. It doesn't affect texture or structure much.

You can also look at other types of sugars as alternatives to white sugar. Unrefined brown sugar or sucanat is less sweet but has more nutrients and minerals. Coconut sugar is less processed and has more nutrients. It's also considered to have a lower glycemic load than white sugar. I use both in baking. I don't use stevia because it tastes bitter to me.

Instead of regular whole wheat flour, use pastry whole wheat flour for cookies. It's lighter and won't make baked goods chewy like bread.
 

AGBF

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Re: Any bakers? Trying to make a cookie recipe more healthy.

baby monster|1413208111|3766420 said:
Coconut sugar is less processed and has more nutrients. It's also considered to have a lower glycemic load than white sugar. I use both in baking. I don't use stevia because it tastes bitter to me.

Instead of regular whole wheat flour, use pastry whole wheat flour for cookies. It's lighter and won't make baked goods chewy like bread.

I cannot stay away from baking threads, even if I just lurk in them. I didn't think I could help much, so I didn't post. The original recipe left me sort of cold. baby monster's baking sounds divine, however. (I am also dieting, and doing a low-carb diet, which makes whole grain products look even better!)

I love cookies made with whole wheat flour and I love sweet whole wheat crackers, like Carr's wheatmeal biscuits. The cookies made with whole wheat pastry flour sound wonderful. I think I have a recipe in a book called The Rainbow Cookbook (somewhere) for cookies made with whole wheat pastry flour and honey that are out of this world delicious.

Deb/AGBF
 

marymm

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Re: Any bakers? Trying to make a cookie recipe more healthy.

In my personal experience, unsweetened applesauce as a 50% substitute for white sugar is a pretty standard substitution in baking. The unsweetened applesauces I've used are thick though, not runny, and I am usually also throwing in some oats as well as wheat flour which help to absorb extra moisture from the applesauce.
 

AGBF

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Re: Any bakers? Trying to make a cookie recipe more healthy.

marymm|1413214106|3766444 said:
In my personal experience, unsweetened applesauce as a 50% substitute for white sugar is a pretty standard substitution in baking. The unsweetened applesauces I've used are thick though, not runny, and I am usually also throwing in some oats as well as wheat flour which help to absorb extra moisture from the applesauce.

Uhh...the addition of applesauce, oats, and wheat flour to pretty much anything that is baked is going to improve it! You and baby monster are really killing me, marymm! ;))

Deb
 

Maria D

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Re: Any bakers? Trying to make a cookie recipe more healthy.

Meh -

Here's my take on it:

Eat more fruits and vegetables. Squash your apples into applesauce when you are eating apples, if you like. But for the love of dessert, keep it out of your cookies.

Eat fewer cookies - but savor the butter and sugar deliciousness of each one!
 

kenny

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Re: Any bakers? Trying to make a cookie recipe more healthy.

I'm a bit of a health freak but refuse to completely give up home made chocolate chip cookies.

I use wheat flour, and evaporated sugar cane juice sugar and real unsalted butter.

No, it's not as healthy as organic tofu with Brusselsprouts, but it's healthier than using white flour, white sugar and lard or Crisco.
 

kenny

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Re: Any bakers? Trying to make a cookie recipe more healthy.

marymm|1413214106|3766444 said:
In my personal experience, unsweetened applesauce as a 50% substitute for white sugar is a pretty standard substitution in baking. The unsweetened applesauces I've used are thick though, not runny, and I am usually also throwing in some oats as well as wheat flour which help to absorb extra moisture from the applesauce.

I'm going to try this.
Thanks.
 

AGBF

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Re: Any bakers? Trying to make a cookie recipe more healthy.

I don't want to eat it if it doesn't taste good, but sometimes things made with "healthy" ingredients are delicious. (I hate tofu.) I think bran muffins (which are very fattening unless one plays with the recipe) are delicious, for example. Yet they are healthy. And I love every apple recipe known to (wo)mankind! Some of them are fabulous with brown sugar!!! And what about pumpkin? Which reminds me, isn't it time for the fall baking thread?

Deb/AGBF
:saint:
 

FancyIntense

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Re: Any bakers? Trying to make a cookie recipe more healthy.

You can also use oat flour to make cookies. Just put oats in the food processor and then you have oat flour!
 

FrekeChild

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Re: Any bakers? Trying to make a cookie recipe more healthy.

There was a long time where I didn't even have white flour in my pantry, only whole wheat. You really don't notice much of a difference if you're just a casual cookie eater.

As far as sugar goes, sugar melts in the oven and the amounts of sugar changes the texture of the end product.

I would do a lot of experimentation. Small changes in amounts can make huge textural changes.

Also, as a note, pastry flour has about the same gluten content as all purpose flour, with cake having less gluten, and bread flour having more gluten. All purpose and pastry are both in the middle. Odds are that you wouldn't notice a difference if you interchanged them.
 

CJ2008

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Re: Any bakers? Trying to make a cookie recipe more healthy.

Thank you marymm for the very specific substitutes and instructions! And yes, I am really enjoying making things healthier in general, thank you. Yesterday I made baked sweet potato fries - they didn't come out as crispy as I wanted, but they were tasty anyway. And so much better than regular fries.

bluegirl - that's how my DH and I feel...we don't like overly sweet to begin with, and most things taste overly sweet to me. The Vanilla Wafers we buy (Murray) have the least sugar of all of them but sometimes I get that "too sweet" feeling anyway. Especially as I cut down my sugar and my taste buds adjust.

JulieN - a lot of what I read online does say that applesauce is a common substitute for sugar...but yes, I could see how it could work better in some recipes than others. Since I am not an experienced baker I will probably just leave it out of the equation for these cookies though because the applesauce I bought (unsweetened) is somewhat runny.

partgypsy - that's probably what I'll end up doing - just using half the sugar it calls for. Thanks for the tip on the "white" whole wheat - I had read that somewhere else, too, but nothing like hearing it first hand. I don't have any right now but will try it next time...

toopatient - thanks...most of the time I don't tell DH about any substitutions either. I just see if he likes it first and THEN I may tell him.

April20 - thanks...I am going to see if I can just deal with half the sugar/sweetness (keeps it more to my goal of not craving the sweetness). But thank you for that tip, I had never heard of that sugar substitute before.

baby monster - I feel like a whole new world opened up to me...I didn't realize there was so many different types of sugars and flours...I just thought sugar is sugar (although I did know of brown sugar of course) and flour is flour. I didn't realize different types could affect texture, nutrition, etc. I am really not a baker or cook as you can see! I'll use the white for now but will keep the others in mind (I did replace white salt for pink for the most part). I'm going to have fun experimenting.

MariaD - I hear you. That's why I don't want to change so much that they don't even TASTE or FEEL like cookies. But since neither DH or I have a crazy sweet tooth I feel I can make these healthier than storebought and STILL truly find them delicious. Like AGBF says, I too find many healthy things delicious. And kenny, yes, some changes are still better than none, I'm with you on that.

Fancy - I ran into this tip too...will eventually try it. One step at a time! haha I am the laziest cook/baker ever the few times I even bakd or cook!

Freke - yes, I will experiment, will be fun...I made pear bread the other day substituting some ingredients and wrote down exactly what I did so I can either reproduce it next time (it came out delicious) or play with the ingredients even more and see what happens.

Thank you all! :wavey: I will probably be making them today!
 
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