Whether it’s cinnamon stars, gingerbread or vanilla crescents: homemade cookies are an absolute must at Christmas. The treats can also be made a little healthier: with less or no sugar, fat and calories.
In the Advent season, you have to resist a few temptations in order not to become as round as a rum ball yourself.
Especially the variety of cookies makes many mouths water. Who can say no to gingerbread, cinnamon stars and other vanilla crescents?
Bake The Cookies Yourself Instead Of Buying Them
Fewer calories, less fat and less sugar is the new motto for Christmas cookies – but of course, the enjoyment and taste are fully retained.
Anyone who has bravely resisted the display of Christmas sweets in the supermarket over the past few weeks: keeps it up! Because ready-made cookies often contain almost 50 percent sugar, plus a lot of fat.
Saving calories when baking cookies is very simple: most calories come from fat and sugar. In most cases, you can save on sugar in particular without suffering as a result.
Far too sticky and too sweet calorie bombs can be avoided if you take control of the ingredient list yourself.
So please get to the cutters; it’s time to bake it yourself from now on!
Five Tips On How To Bake Healthier
Baking Christmas cookies yourself lays the foundation for healthier enjoyment.
But don’t you need chocolate, sugar, honey, succade and a bit of cinnamon for delicious cookies,
But: With a few tricks, you can also save a few calories in your kitchen with cinnamon stars, rascals and vanilla crescents.
Darker Instead Of Whole Milk
In terms of calories, dark chocolate is not precisely lightweight – it often has even more calories than its lighter milk chocolate counterpart.
But dark chocolate has a decisive advantage: the jieper on chocolate is eaten much faster thanks to the intense cocoa taste. In addition, bitter substances curb appetite. And: dark chocolate is rich in cell-protecting antioxidants.
Dark chocolate is also clearly ahead of whole milk in terms of macronutrients: More than 50 grams of carbohydrates or sugar are in real milk chocolate, while dark chocolate (85 percent cocoa) boasts less than 30 grams of sugar but 9 grams of protein.
Therefore, when it comes to chocolate biscuits, gingerbread or dominoes, it is better to use the dark variant – varieties with a cocoa content of at least 70 percent are ideal.
Extra tip: For the chocolaty cookie dough, you could just as easily use baking cocoa—zero fat, far fewer calories.
Choose A Healthier Dough
When baking cookies, you can rely on lower-calorie recipes with yeast or biscuit dough. Shortcrust pastry or puff pastry, on the other hand, are naturally high in fat.
Macaroons (e.g. coconut macaroons) contain no flour, are gluten-free and have a low-calorie balance. If you replaced the sugar with a low-calorie variant, the macaroons would be super low carb.
But which sugar alternatives make sense for cookies?
Choose Sugar Alternatives
To save calories, you can tweak the amount of sugar and butter in your favorite cookie recipe or replace the flour completely with protein powder. It is better to refrain from deviating too much from the recipe.
If you use too little butter, the dough will quickly become dry and crumble. And you shouldn’t simply eliminate the sugar either – otherwise, the taste will also disappear.
But: Natural sugar substitutes are also sweet – but have fewer calories.
Healthier alternatives are, for example, coconut blossom sugar, maple syrup, rice syrup, dried fruit or nut butter.
Date syrup has less than 300 kcal per 100 milliliters. However, the dense mass cannot be used as a sugar substitute in every recipe.
Better is erythritol: A sugar alcohol that is carbohydrate and calorie-free. Best of all, it can be used like sugar in baking and has about the same sweetening power.
Beacon Narrower
It can be not easy to eat only three vanilla crescents with a cup of chai tea in the afternoon instead of six. Then it’s now: Hello sham packaging. Cookies can be easily cheated narrower: On the one hand, the dough is rolled out thinner than usual when baking.
On the other hand, form more miniature croissants or use smaller cookie cutters. So the biscuit plate stays as complete as before but cheers on fewer calories.
Make Cookie Plates Colorful
It is precisely the variety of colorful cookies that makes the Advent season so tempting. You can easily enjoy a colorful plate with various delicacies without a guilty conscience.
Important: Not only do chocolate balls and cinnamon stars belong on the plate, but also a large portion of fruit.
Oranges, apples and pears are a great accompaniment to Christmas-spiced biscuits and fill the stomach in a much healthier way – this is how the nicely arranged treat cuts a fine figure in the truest sense of the word.