Healthy Cookies for Snacks

Cakes and cookies are the first to go when we start eating sensibly. What if we told you that you don't need to give up on cookies during snack time? All you have to do is eat the right cookies. Here's a recipe that blends in your daily almond intake with whole grains and natural sweetner to give you a wholesome batch of almond and honey cookies. Enjoy them as snacks on the go, or as evening tea snacks to celebrate the end of another work day. Here they are - all natural healthy almond cookies.

Ingredients:

·         Almonds for the cookie dough – 1 cup

·         Almonds for garnishing (10-12)

·         Honey – 2/3rd cup

·         Oil – 1/4th cup

·         Unsalted butter – 3 tablespoons

·         Eggs – 2 medium, or 1 large

·         Vanilla extract – 1 teaspoon

·         Multi-grain flour, or whole wheat flour – 1 cup

·         All-purpose flour (maida) – 1 ½ cup

·         Baking powder – 1 teaspoon

·         Salt – ½ teaspoon

Method:

Toast the almonds. Preheat the oven at 180C, then dunk them in for 8 minutes. Once they’re out, allow them to cool before grinding them. Then, grind them into a fine powder. You can leave it slightly chunky if you like your cookies grainy.

Add the almond powder, both flours, baking powder and salt to a large bowl. Mix well. Add the honey, unsalted butter, and oil to a separate mixing bowl. Beat well till everything becomes one golden, liquid mass. Add the egg/s and the vanilla extract and beat well till well combined. Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients, mix well and then refrigerate for an hour. This step is important to get the cookie dough’s consistency right. Without this step, you’ll waste a lot of time trying to get the cookie dough to listen to you. Preheat the oven at 180C once again. Coat some aluminum foil with a light spray of oil, and lay out the cookies. You could try interesting shapes, or go for the basic roundels as we did. Put the cookies in and set the oven’s timer at 16 minutes (if you like your cookies soft) or 20 minutes (if you like your cookies harder around the edges). You can now garnish the cookies with some almonds. You could dip these almonds in some honey, or even drop a tiny bit of peanut butter or jam in each cookie’s middle.*Image courtesy: © Thinkstock photos/ Getty Images