We’re officially in the holiday season, and that means it’s time to get your stand mixers and oven mitts out for cookie baking.
Among USA TODAY’s holiday cookie baking tips: Come up with a baking strategy, choose at least one recipe from each of these five categories and separate strong flavors and milder cookies before putting them into a cooking box.
But if you have health goals or are worried about your habits falling to the wayside this holiday season, here are a few tips to make your holiday cookie baking a bit more nutritious.
You can look at a healthier approach to holiday cookies from two perspectives.
If traditional baking is your thing, licensed dietitian nutritionist Abra Pappa recommends spending a little extra time searching for the best quality ingredients. Look for high-quality baking flour, sugar and butter.
If you’re a little more experimental in the kitchen, try out a different kind of flour, which Pappa says can upgrade the nutritional density of your cookie. Options like almond, cassava or oat flour often have more protein, vitamins and minerals than white flour.
You also may have an easier time with moderation. Cookies, like other desserts, are hyper-palatable foods, meaning their combination of fat, sugar, sodium and carbohydrates makes them addictive and artificially rewarding to eat.
“You’re getting, I think, a more satisfying experience,” Pappa says, of cookies made with alternative flours. “Because there’s more fat, there’s more protein, it is inherently more satiating.”
For example, 100 grams of all-purpose flour contains 13.3 grams of protein, 3.3 grams of fiber and 0.33 grams of fiber, as well as a touch of iron. The same amount of almond flour has 21.4 grams of protein, 14.3 grams of fiber, as well as more calcium, iron, magnesium and potassium.
You can also change your traditional white sugar out for something different. Pappa recommends honey, maple syrup or coconut palm sugar, a one-to-one sugar swap that adds “layers of flavor,” she says.
While white sugar has a “place in our diet,” Pappa says, coconut palm sugar is nutritionally superior. It’s a low glycemic food, so it’ll have less of a blood sugar impact than regular sugar, according to an analysis in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. It also contains minerals like zinc, iron, potassium, phosphorus and phytonutrients with antioxidant properties. Cane sugar has little to no nutritional benefit.
Pappa also recommends searching for recipes that use whole food sources, like dates, bananas or sweet potatoes, instead of sugar or alongside sugar. You’ve probably used bananas as a supportive sweetener in banana bread – it often doesn’t replace sugar or other sweeteners completely, but it makes it so that you don’t have to include as much.
“They will have an impact on your blood sugar but very, very different than white sugar,” she says.
But if you’re partial to the taste of regular sugar in baking, you can make your cookies a bit healthier by decreasing the amount of sugar you add.
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If you’re game to try any of these nutrient-dense swaps, there are a few things you need to know from a culinary standpoint.
First, it’s not an exact one-to-one swap. If you’re baking for gluten-intolerant family members, you can find some gluten-free flours that are exact substitutes for all-purpose flour, but many alternative flours are not. Instead of trying to reinvent the proverbial chocolate chip cookie wheel, Pappa points to developers who create recipes that match the flavor and texture profile of those flours.
“When we lean into some of these alternative flours, what I recommend is finding a recipe specifically using those flours because it is a very different ratio,” Pappa says.
You can also experiment with flour combinations, like this Authentic Linzer Cookie recipe that uses both all-purpose and almond flour.
Adding in more nutritional options doesn’t mean you have to get rid of your holiday traditions.
“My mother bakes typically 12 different kinds of cookies every Christmas and she will kick me out of the kitchen if I even show up with a tablespoon of almond flour – not happening,” Pappa says.
Baked goods around the holidays are important cultural, social and family traditions; ascribing shame or guilt to them may lead to an unhealthy relationship with food. Instead, Pappa recommends swapping in one new recipe each year that has more whole-food sources in flour or sugar.
“Usually the resistance is around (the) fear that it’s not going to taste good,” Pappa says. “I’m always interested in expanding people’s palates to better understand that these health food products are fantastic (nutritionally) but absolutely delicious.”
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