A Healthy LunchBox Snack: Whole Grain Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

Those hungry little munchers are gonna want a sweet treat in their lunch box come the first day of school…. And I have just the thing for you! Packed full of whole grain goodness, honey sweetness, and just a little bit of deliciousness from chocolate chips, these Whole Grain Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies will fill their tummies and their hearts.

You can find the recipe at Baking Whole Grains, where I am visiting for the day.

 

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Vegan Spelt Chocolate Chip Cookies {Secret Recipe Club}

Wheat-Free Dairy-Free Egg-Free Nut-Free Spelt Chocolate Chip Sunflower Seed Butter Cookies

My most profound apologies to Noelle of An Opera Singer in the Kitchen. Although I love to sing and I love music, I have to admit… I’m not a big fan of opera. Like real, actual opera, where they dress up and sing tragical stories where everyone dies.

However, I am a big fan of the well-trained classical voice, and I can’t help but feel a thrill when I hear the depths of passion and power an excellent voice can exude. As a choral singer, I’m particularly fond of oratorios (Handel’s Messiah is a famous example) and the like, but as long as I’m being honest, I must say that my favorite music genre is pop opera. I know that makes me totally plebeian, but there you have it. Sarah Brightman, Amici Forever, Il Divo, Josh Groban… yes, I confess I am a fan of all of these.

But you don’t have to be an opera fan to enjoy Noelle’s blog! You just have to be a fan of food… and I think we all qualify. Noelle has got quite a fabulous collection of recipes there, including a large number of vegan recipes. Now is the perfect time of year to try out her Fluffy Vegan Pumpkin Biscuits or perhaps Almond Quinoa Hot Cereal. Her BBQ Chickpea Burgers are on my list to try.

As you know, I love spelt, so I was quite happy to discover her selection of spelt recipes. In fact, I ended up trying her Spelt Choco-Peanut Butter Cookies as a treat for My Certain Little Someone to share with his Wednesday night class at church. They were a huge hit! I have to admit, that despite the fact that I am avoiding carbs and sugar right now, I snuck one or two. Or maybe three.

I made a few adjustments to the recipe to make them allergy-friendly for The Boys, the most notable being eliminating the peanut butter chips because they can’t eat those. I still wanted to retain the “peanut butter flavor”, though, so I thought maybe I could try replacing the margarine in the recipe with homemade sunflower seed butter. It didn’t exactly work like I thought it would, and I ended up having to make additional adjustments. The final result was delicious, though! Thanks, Noelle, for a fabulous recipe!


Now, go and listen to some of Noelle’s beautiful singing. Why, yes, even this non-opera lover enjoyed it!

Read more about The Secret Recipe Club and find out how you can join! We’d love to have you.

Sharing at some of these wonderful link-ups: Homestead Barn Hop, Mom’s Monday Mingle, The Bulletin Board, Better Mom Mondays, Open Call Tuesday, Delicious Dishes, Teach Me Tuesday, Titus 2sDay, Hip Homeschool Hop, Tiny Tip Tuesday, Titus 2 Tuesday, Tip me Tuesday, Trivium Tuesday, Healthy 2Day Wednesday, Allergy-Free Wednesday, Works for Me Wednesday, Women Living Well Wednesday, Frugal Days Sustainable Ways, Real Food Wednesday, Whole Foods Wednesday, Keep it Real Thursday, Tastetastic Thursday, Homemaking Link UP, Simple Lives Thursday, Thought-Provoking Thursday, Life in Bloom, Frugal Thursday Rewind, Fellowship Friday, Fight Back Friday, Feast in Fellowship Friday, Frugal Friday, I’m Lovin’ It, Weekend Bloggy Reading, Snacktime Saturday, Show & Share Saturday, Weekend Whatever

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A Sweet Treat for You - Whole Wheat Skillet Blondies

I honestly haven’t really been indulging my sweet tooth much lately, but that doesn’t mean I won’t share a treat or two with you, my friend. This particular one I made for a gathering a week or two ago, so I shared it with lots of other people and only had a tiny little piece myself.

Thank goodness, too, because it was quite delicious, and I’m pretty sure I would have eaten the whole pan if left to my own devices.

Moral of the story: sweet stuff is for sharing. If you’re going to make it, you’d better share it.

So I’m sharing it with you today over at the Grain Mill Wagon. See ya there!

This post was made possible by WonderMill and the Grain Mill Challenge.

Sharing at Titus 2sday, Teach Me Tuesday, Domestically Divine Tuesday, Traditional Tuesday, Women Living Well Wednesday, Works for me Wednesday, Frugal Days Sustainable Ways,Homemaking LinkUp, Whole Foods Wednesday, Encourage One Another, The Mommy Club, Simple Lives Thursday, Your Green Resource, Fight Back Friday, Friday Favorites

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Healthy Cookies. Yes, HEALTHY Cookies! {Secret Recipe Club ~ August 2012}

My secret blog for this month’s Secret Recipe Club was Everyday Mom, written by Kim, whose love of baking is evident when you browse through her Recipes page! I’m pretty fond of baking myself, so I had fun looking through her archives and trying to decide which delicious-sounding treat I should make: Apple Cake with Maple Frosting (when autumn comes, for sure!)? Maple Mousse (I’d never heard of that one!)? Or maybe Yeasted Coffee Cake (complicated, but - I imagine - totally worth it)?

In the end, I settled for none of these, and instead made a treat that was angelically good in comparison: Banana Oatmeal Cookies, which happened to be her Secret Recipe Club post from last July. If you leave out the chocolate chips (but really, now, who does that?), they have absolutely no added sugar! And while I personally could probably never bring myself to make them without the chocolate chips, I think they would still be perfectly sweet without them because the bananas offer all the sweetness necessary.

You may or may not need quite as many bananas, depending on how big they are. I think mine were larger than usual, because 4 made the mixture very liquidy. I ended up adding some oat flour to make them more of a cookie consistency, but next time I’ll probably start with fewer bananas and see how it goes. Below is the recipe exactly as I made it.


These were so QUICK to make; I could make a batch every week if I had enough bananas!

They were super EASY, too. My Certain Little Someone happily helped me stir and spoon them out.

They are pretty CHEAP, as well, using very few ingredients.

And very HEALTHY, without the added sugars! The natural sugars in the bananas, plus whatever sweetener is in the nut butter and chocolate chips make these perfectly sweet.

If you’re curious about the Secret Recipe Club, you can read more about it here.



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SRC: Orange Chocolate Macaroons

Wow,Secret Recipe Club time came around fast this month! It totally caught me by surprise near the end of my OAMS cycle, and due to poor planning on my part, I happened to be completely out of flour and oats. That pretty much eliminated any baking, and I didn’t have time to try any main dish recipes. Thankfully, Cupcake Muffin, my assigned blog, came to my rescue with a simple recipe that not only requires minimal ingredients (that I happened to have on hand, miracle of miracles) but that also tastes amazingly delicious. Even better? I’m the only one in the house that can eat them, so they are all mine. Muahahahahahahah! There are some perks to being the only person in the house without any dietary issues.

As for next month: I will not run out of wheat flour and I will finish my Secret Recipe Club long before it’s due. I’m trusting you all to keep me accountable, OK?

Now back to my assigned blog: Cupcake Muffin is written by Sara, a grad student at Berkeley who cooks up some pretty amazing stuff. From creative ways to serve vegetables (Carrot Fennel Salad, for example), to delicious new twists on old dinner-time favorites (try the Chicken Tinga Tacos), to decadent desserts (how about some Grapefruit Mint Tarragon Chocolate Tart?), she’s got you covered! After all, she’s been blogging since 2007, so there’s a lot of great content to be discovered.

For reasons already mentioned, I chose to make her Orange Chocolate Chip Macaroons, which turned out to be quite serendipitous. Orange and chocolate is a combination I love , and I always enjoy trying new recipes to utilize it. These macaroons were no exception! Delicious, in a word. You definitely won’t be able to eat just one.

I made only a portion of the recipe, since, as I mentioned, I’m the only one in the house who can eat these. So here’s my small batch version, which doesn’t differ much from Sara’s original recipe.


I would recommend using Let’s Do Organic or Tropical Traditions dried coconut for this recipe, as most other versions have lots of sugar and other unnecessary ingredients in them. If you use the right kind of coconut, these will actually be some pretty healthy cookies!

These cookies were so QUICK to make - they do take a long time to bake up (25 minutes) but the prep time was minimal, 10- minutes or less.

Deliciously EASY, too. For some reason I always thought macaroons were hard, but not so!

This recipe uses minimal ingredients (especially in a small batch, which is great if you don’t need a large quantity), so it’s a great CHEAP treat.

If you use the right kind of coconut, and chocolate chips with real ingredients, these cookies can be relatively HEALTHY. They still have sugar, so they’re not a health food, but they’re a healthier option for snack than most cookies (especially store-bought ones!).

Intrigued by the Secret Recipe Club concept? Join here!


Linking up at:
Hearth & Soul Traditional Tuesday

 

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The Secret to Perfectly Round Spiral Cookies

Christmas is pretty much the only time of year that I go all out with the cookie-baking, even busting out the rolling pin to make all kinds of complicated cookie varieties, like sugar cookies and spiral cookies. The rest of the year, I stick to the easy stuff, usually resorting to drop cookies and bar cookies because I’m lazy like that.

But if I’m going to go to all the trouble to make those kinds of cookies, then I want them to turn out right. And it always kind of annoys me that those silly spiral and icebox cookies get that flat edge where they rest on the counter or in the fridge. They’re supposed to be round for goodness’ sakes.

I’ve tried my best to form perfectly round logs, and treat them very gently so as to preserve the shape, to no avail. I always get that stinkin’ flat edge.

Until this year. This year, I have discovered the secret. I read about it on a blog (I forget which one now) for another purpose and immediately realized the possibilities of this little trick! My spiral and icebox cookies will now and forever more be round!

All you have to do is grab a toilet paper tube, or a paper towel tube, or a wrapping paper tube. For purposes of ease in handling, you will want to cut the paper towel tube in half, and the wrapping paper tube into several smaller portions.

Once you have a cardboard tube approximately 6″ in length, cut a slit along one side of the tube so that it looks kind of like a hot dog bun. Take a piece of foil and wrap it around the inside of the cardboard-tube-hot-dog-bun, and fold it around the outside.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so here’s a picture of what I’m talking about:

Here’s another vantage point:

Now go about your business rolling up your perfectly round log of cookie dough, then gently place it inside the tube, like a hot dog in a bun.

The cardboard tube creates a mold that helps preserve the shape of the cookies. I’ve found that the toilet paper tubes are not as sturdy as the other kinds, and might need a piece of tape to hold the edges together.

Refrigerate or freeze your dough in this tube, then proceed to slice as usual. Voila! Perfectly round cookies!

Pictured are my Cinnamon Pinwheel cookies.
Growing Home

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Christmas Colors in Your Cookies

No need to pull out the food coloring. God has already given us some pretty amazing colors in the food He created for us, so there’s no reason for us to try to mimic them with cheap - and unnecessary - imitations. For example: cranberries and pistachios, a deep magent-like red, and a lovely dark sage green. Gorgeous!

And to combine them in a cookie? Genius!

I have the pleasure this year of participating in the Second Annual International Bloggers Cookie Recipe Exchange, hosted by Lori of Fake Food Free, and Andrea of Food Embrace. It’s a virtual cookie exchange, where instead of exchanging actual cookies, we exchange the recipe. I was sent 2 recipes to choose from by Mindy of The World in My Kitchen and I picked her Pistachio-Cranberry Icebox Cookies specifically because of the gorgeous color - not to mention flavor - combination. I mean, what says Christmas more than red and green? And even better if you say it with food!

Here’s Mindy’s original recipe, adapted from Epicurious:


And here’s my version:



Aside from the chilling time, these cookies come together fairly QUICKly. And here’s the deal: you can freeze the logs for a month, so that you always have cookie dough ready at a moment’s notice! Surprise guests at Christmas time? You’ll be ready with a treat to share in no time at all!

They involve more work than a drop cookie, but they’re still pretty EASY over all. Your friends will be impressed!

Well, pistachios ain’t CHEAP, that’s for sure. I found mine at Trader Joe’s for a pretty good price ($4.99 I think for a package of shelled pistachios, the best price I could find around here). You can also occasionally find coupons for Wonderful Pistachios or Everybody’s Nuts Pistachios.

These are fairly HEALTHY cookies, as far as cookies go. They’re sweetened with honey, filled with dried fruits and nuts, and a little fiber.

Linking at Tastetastic Thursday, and…

Nap-Time Creations Tempt my Tummy Tuesdays Miz Helen’s Country Cottage

 

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SRC: Triple (Yes, Triple!) Chocolate Banana Cookies.


As Raina of Connor’s Cooking says, “With this name, who wouldn’t want to make it?!” Not me! Or me. However that grammar goes. Point being, I wanted to make it!! So I did.

Welcome to another round of the Secret Recipe Club(Group A), folks! This is where we pick bloggers’ names out of a hat (digital style) and secretly cook up something from their blog. Meanwhile, some other merry blogger is secretly cooking from your blog, which makes Reveal Day (today!) so much fun. Definitely the highlight of my blogging calendar!

So in case you haven’t figured it out yet, I was assigned Connor’s Cooking for my secret blog this month, and had fun perusing Raina’s blog looking for the perfect recipe to try. Just like me, the kitchen is her favorite place to be, and it shows in the large quantity of recipes to browse through. Once I came across the words “triple chocolate“, though, there was no turning back. Chocolate is part of my creed. I refuse to believe anything except that chocolate is healthy, so don’t even try to tell me otherwise. Something so good must be good for me. Right?

Unfortunately for me, I had only one precious little egg sitting in my refrigerator when I set out to make this recipe, and I didn’t want to use it up in cookies. Weird, yes, but hear me out: I like to buy pastured eggs from a local farm, and those little babies cost over $4 a dozen! One does not use such pricey beauties casually! I prefer to eat them straight as part of a meal, and look for egg replacements whenever possible in my baking.

And replacing an egg is so much easier than you might think, which I have learned in the past couple years of baking egg-free (and dairy-free and wheat-free) goodies for my Certain Little Someone. I’ve got a few tricks tucked up my sleeve that keep me baking, egg or no.

The trick this time is banana. Banana goes so well with chocolate that it’s a perfect choice for an egg replacer in a recipe like this. I also decided to take Raina’s advice and double the recipe - double the triple chocolate sounded good to me!

One little problem: I forgot to double the sugar. Oops. The flavor wasn’t too bad, but I think additional sugar would have helped with the texture some. So I have kindly given you the appropriate amount of sugar in the following recipe.



By the way, for the vanilla chips, I used Trader Joe’s brand, which is actually made with real milk, unlike other brands who essentially have created a chemical cocktail and called it “white chocolate”.

This is a great QUICK cookie recipe, just in time for these crazy holidays!

It’s also very EASY; nothin’ fancy goin’ on here, which is just how I like it.

Pretty CHEAP, over all, especially since I cheated on the egg!

HEALTHY-ish. It does have whole wheat flour, which is a plus. And a banana (although there is nothing unhealthy about an egg, so it’s not like that’s much of an improvement on the health scale). And, ummmm, well, that’s about all I can say for it. Enjoy in moderation, ‘K?



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Secret Recipe Club and Sunbutter Surprises

This is my first time joining in the fun as part of the Secret Recipe Club, a fabulous blogging event kind of like Secret Santa, whereby each blogger is secretly assigned to blog about a recipe from another blogger, and all posts are unveiled at exactly the same time. I have no idea (yet) who is blogging about a recipe from my blog, and Dana at Food For Thought has no idea that I’ve been searching through all her recipes, trying to pick just one to try out for the grand reveal.

I was greatly intrigued by her incredible collection of internationally inspired recipes, and almost chose several of them. In the end, though, I settled on a sweet treat that presented a challenge to me: Peanut Butter Kiss Cookies. The whole idea of the cookie fascinated me, as the only ingredients are peanut butter, sugar, cinnamon and egg, topped with a Hershey’s kiss.

The challenging part came in the form of our dietary restrictions around here, due to allergies on the part of the little people. I wanted to make this cookie safe enough for both me and my son, which meant that I had to make it without:

  • peanut butter
  • egg
  • Hershey’s kisses

(Side note: I don’t think Hershey knows how to make chocolate without milk… even their dark chocolate products all have milk in them! Pffbbtt! Not that it really matters because I almost never buy chocolate candy anyway, but still.)

So exactly how does one make a recipe where 3 out of the 5 ingredients must be eliminated or substituted?

Turns out it was pretty easy.

I actually made these three times, each time slightly different, and each time delicious, but the best was the first attempt, and the recipe I give you below. I substituted:

  • sunflower seed butter for the peanut butter
  • flax gel for the egg
  • chocolate chips (dairy-free) for the Hershey’s kisses.

And instead of topping the cookie with the chocolate, I tucked a few chocolate chips inside it, taking them from Peanut Butter Kiss Cookies to Sunbutter Surprises.


It really is rather amazing that this conglomeration of ingredients actually forms a roll-able dough that bakes up perfectly! If you’re skeptical, try it for yourself. Then you’ll be eating cookie after cookie after cookie just to make sure they really did turn out as well as you thought after the first one. Not that I’m speaking from experience, of course. I would never eat that many cookies.

You can, of course, use peanut butter instead of the sunflower seed butter, and a real egg instead of the flax gel. If you want, you can even top with Hershey’s kisses instead of rolling chocolate chips inside.

However, I would not recommend toying with the sugar amount or attempting to use any other kind of chocolate on the inside. When I reduced the sugar even by just 1/4 cup, the consistency was too crumbly and the resulting cookie didn’t hold together quite as well. Which is a bummer, because that’s a lot of sugar, so these cookies are definitely relegated to special treat status. Also, I was out of chocolate chips the second time I wanted to try these, so I attempted to make my own… big mistake. The chocolate chips themselves were moderately successful, but they melted all over the place and seeped out of the cookie, making a big mess and a not very yummy final result.

One other thing: I had the most success with Trader Joe’s sunflower seed butter, which is unfortunate, because it has added sugar. I also tried these with the Maranatha brand, which is more natural and has no sugar, but it was for some reason too dry. I tried adding a little coconut oil to make up for that, but the consistency still didn’t come out right.

For a rolled cookie, these come together very QUICKly, aided, I am sure, by the minimal number of ingredients.

Despite the unorthodox ingredient list, these really are very EASY.

Not CHEAP by any stretch, though, considering the cost of sunflower seed butter. Regular peanut butter is a different story, as you can find it on sale with coupons for $1 or less. I suppose I could reduce the cost by making my own sunflower seed butter, but I don’t think I have a powerful enough grinder/food processor/blender.

It’s not really HEALTHY, either, because of the sugar.

Ingredient Spotlight

Check out what the other bloggers in the Secret Recipe Club are up to:



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Better than the Box: Gingersnaps!

Bad camera + bad photographer = terrible pictures.

*sigh*

I took 64 pictures of these stupid gingersnaps in the mid-afternoon when the lighting was perfect, and this is all I got.

*sigh*

I wish I had a better camera and some lighting equipment. But as my mother would say, “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.” I don’t know exactly what that means, except that we don’t always get what we wish for. Oh, and another appropriate favorite saying of hers, “Beggars can’t be choosers.” Yup, definitely applicable.

So, even if they don’t look all that great in the pics, take my word for it that these gingersnaps are just as good as any you’ll buy at the grocery store. And I should know - we love gingersnaps around here, ginger being a favorite flavor of every member of the family, so we’ve tried a few. I can highly recommend Trader Joe’s Triple Ginger Snaps, which also have candied ginger in them… mmmmm! I’d have added candied ginger to these, but I don’t have any on hand. Next time!

I don’t know why, but despite our love for all things ginger, I have never once attempted to make gingersnaps until recently. I’ve made gingerbread bears for Christmas many years in a row, and I’ve even made soft ginger cookies, but never gingersnaps. I guess I figured they were easier to buy, so we only ate them on a rare occasion.

Once I tried it, though, we were hooked. I’ve made 2 batches in as many weeks, and we’ve eaten them like they’re going out of style. It might seem strange to talk about gingersnaps - a Christmas-y kind of treat - at Easter time, but perhaps you’ll change your mind when I tell you that they go oh-so-fabulously with my Coconut Lime Mousse. In fact, that is how I’m going to serve the mousse: in a teacup with a little gingersnap for decoration.

Won’t that just be so cute?!

There’s a lot to love about these little babies - their taste, the fact that they’re so easy to make, and their cute little size - but one of my favorite things is that they are naturally dairy-free and egg-free, and are easily made gluten-free. That means a delicious little snack my entire family can enjoy, which is a huge victory around here!

From start to finish, the entire batch takes half an hour or less, so I’d say it’s a pretty QUICK cookie recipe.

And all in one pot: can we say EASY?!

No eggs, no dairy not only means allergy-friendly, but CHEAP! Granted, the good shortening is very expensive, but this recipe uses less than a 1/4 cup.

I love that it uses little to no sugar, which makes it a HEALTHY-er cookie option. Molasses is still a sweetener and so should still be used sparingly, but it does offer nutrients, like iron, which you cannot find in even the best kind of cane sugar. I also love that whole grains - like brown rice, and whole wheat flour - go so well in this recipe. And you can totally omit the sugar, if you prefer - I just think it looks pretty - they taste just fine without it. Mind you, it’s essential to use organic palm oil shortening - none of that yucky vegetable Crisco stuff.

Berk's Girl: Sweets, Eats & Life's Treats

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