Thursday, April 15, 2010

Carb Conscious Peanut Butter Cookies















Before low carb, I was an accomplished baker.

As in people fought over my cookies. On occasion they would hoard them and squirrel them away from others. Hubby took some to school once and he has one professor that still, to this day, occasionally emails to ask for the recipe. If I do say so myself, I make some damn fine sweets.

I still make a few things but just for the holidays. I briefly contemplated trying to sell cookies (some of my recipes are original) but realized I would not be able to abstain from the sugar. It was best to give it up for my health.

Anyway, with the current weight loss effort, I've been approaching things more holistically in the sense of challenging myself to learn how to cook all over again.

The hubby says my cooking has improved. :) Although he misses the cookies. :(

Recently, the toddler started driving me nuts with a constant refrain of 'I'm huuuuuuuungry!' I almost bought snack crackers for her at the store. I was that tired of the whining and scrambling to find food to keep up with her appetite, but I couldn't find any with a food label that passed muster.

So instead I decided to make a 'protein' cookie for her in the hopes that would help appease her increasingly demanding appetite. It's gotta be a growth spurt, she's out eating both myself and the hubby of late.

The end result of my experiment was a gluten free, protein packed peanut butter cookie. These are really delicious and very simple to make.

Ingredients
1 cup natural peanut butter (I nuked it a bit to make it runny)
1/2 cup sugar or sweetener (again, I don't feed the toddler chemical sweeteners)
1/2 cup almond flour OR ground flax meal
1 egg
Some vanilla
1 tsp baking soda
1/4 cup sugar for coating cookies prior to baking

Optional add ins like chocolate chips. I had some white chocolate laying around that I tossed in (I know, not the greatest thing but 6 white chocolate chips aren't going to do anyone in).

Instructions

Blend the peanut butter, egg vanilla and sugar.

Add the almond flour/flax meal and baking soda and chocolate.

Mix the ingredients--you might need to use your hands.

Form into small balls (about the size of a big marble).

Roll in sugar.

Bake 10 min at 350F. Not a second longer or they'll burn.

Makes about 16 small cookies.

Not a super low carb food, more a balanced protein-fat-carb food, but good for growing toddlers I think. If I were making it for me, I would use dark chocolate chips as well as the Splenda brown sugar blend but still dip in sugar.

These were really yummy. I had to slap the hubby's hands away (else he would've eaten them all and the asphyxiated me with peanut induced farts all night). Hopefully, they'll fill the toddler's tummy.

Just in case, I made some pumpkin spice almond-flax muffins too.

The toddler will probably be around 6' at full height and she eats like it too! I hope I can keep up with her appetite.

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