Every year during the pre-Christmas season, kitchens smell of homemade cookies, gingerbread, macaroons, and other treats. At the same time, people drive more often during the winter months when the weather gets unpleasant. This means: less exercise combined with higher calorie intake from holiday treats. To counter this a little, you can test whether it really needs to be so much sugar and white flour. Can't it be healthier? Absolutely—here are our tips for healthier yet delicious Christmas cookies.
What makes most cookies so unhealthy
Think about it for a moment, and then name out loud the first three ingredients that come to mind when thinking of cookie dough. Was it sugar, butter, flour for you too? Tastes delicious when everything is mixed and baked, no question. The problem is that almost every regular cookie (and cake) recipe contains an unhealthily large amount of sugar. Regular household sugar is refined and doesn't do anything good for you and your body. If it were present in a healthier form that burns more slowly in the body, that would be much better. Butter in itself isn't the problem either, provided it's good butter, ideally from grass-fed cows. Flour itself is fine, unless it consists of so-called empty calories from white wheat flour, where all the good nutrients from the grain's outer hull are conspicuously absent. In short: all three main ingredients present in almost every cookie dough come in a highly processed version that contains almost no good components anymore—only to be burned by the body as empty calories.
Better ingredients for healthier cookies
A great way to bake healthier Christmas cookies is to choose healthier ingredients. Empty carbohydrates, high amounts of unhealthy fats, and refined sugar simply aren't recommended in large quantities. So what could we choose instead? Instead of wheat flour, other types of flour such as (whole grain) spelt flour, a mixture of ground nuts and flour, or even just finely ground almonds or hazelnuts are good options. Instead of refined industrial sugar, there are many sugar alternatives such as xylitol or erythritol. Or whole cane sugar, which has the delicious added benefit of a subtle caramel flavor. If you prefer liquid sweeteners, honey, agave nectar, or date puree are really good options for adding sweetness to your dough. There are even substitutes for regular powdered sugar nowadays, such as powdered erythritol blends.
Low-carb recipes for lower-calorie holiday treats
Look specifically for tried-and-tested recipes that swap out excessive flour for other ingredients like ground nuts or healthier flours with similar baking properties. The latter is important because with certain baked goods, simply swapping wheat flour for almond flour at random won't work. That's always the case when flour serves as a binding agent in the dough. Standard flour made from grains like wheat or spelt contains gluten, which acts as a binder. Almond flour, as the name suggests, is made from almonds—without any binding properties. Anyone who has tried a 1-to-1 swap will have realized that for some recipes, it just doesn't work at all. Therefore, my recommendation is to look online for proven recipes where the combination of ingredients works wonderfully with healthier alternatives.
Sugar substitutes: The holy grail of baking?
There are many ways to replace regular household sugar with a supposedly healthier product. Still, a bitter aftertaste remains for me. In principle, there are three groups:
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Natural sugar alternatives such as honey, concentrated fruit syrups (agave nectar, apple syrup, etc.), syrups (rice syrup, maple syrup, etc.), coconut sugar, and raw cane sugar or whole cane sugar. However, they all still contain plenty of calories. Some have a lower glycemic index, meaning they are metabolized more slowly in the body. What they all have in common is that they are a bit more natural than refined sugar.
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Sugar alcohols like xylitol or erythritol. These are sugar alcohols that are essentially created in a lab and usually contain fewer calories than standard household sugar. But how healthy can something be that has to be extracted through a chemical process in the first place?
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Synthetic sweeteners such as saccharin or sucralose. They all have a significantly higher sweetening power than regular sugar and are often used as sugar substitutes in various light products. They taste the least like real sugar, and it is still not completely clear what long-term effects the continuous consumption of sweeteners has on the human body.
The first group is by far my favorite. Nevertheless, if you really want to cut back on sugar, there is a very simple method: Use less sugar than stated in the recipe! For years, I've been baking my gingerbread with only 200 instead of 300 grams of sugar. Many recipes are much too sweet, so you can easily cut back without sacrificing quality. Or replace part of it with sugar substitutes. The simplest option: Choose recipes that are only subtly sweetened with natural fruit purees like date or banana puree or similar.
Healthy cookie alternatives: Just give them a try
There are plenty of ideas online on how to avoid unnecessary and empty calories in classic Christmas cookies. Classics include alternative recipes for coconut macaroons, cinnamon stars, and vanilla crescents. These three cookie classics already come with a reasonably good list of basic ingredients. Now you can experiment with how they turn out if you use less sugar—and healthier options—than stated in the recipe. Or swap part of the sugar for slightly healthier alternatives. Oatmeal cookies coated with a bit of dark chocolate always pass as Christmas cookies too. Vegan cookie variations or low-carb recipes naturally feature healthier ingredients. A basic combination of egg whites plus ground nuts, as is often the case with macaroons, is certainly healthier than recipes high in flour. If you're open to alternatives, you'll easily find healthy cookie recipes. Otherwise: Enjoying in moderation and staying active is still the best recipe.
