Almost Vegan Spelt Walnut Chocolate Chip Cookies

Did you get all that?  I could throw Stevia in to the name, but nahhh!  I made these cookies three times in one evening.  The recipe is pretty small and super easy to mix up with just a bowl and a wooden spoon.  I’ve been enjoying playing around with Stevia In the Raw after using it with the Mint Chocolate Chip Frozen Yogurt I made recently and trying it in different things.  I wanted to try it with my favorite—a chocolate chip cookie, but I wanted it to be a rather healthy version of the chocolate chip cookie.  After somewhat of a search I found  these cookies at Sweet + Natural.  They are a Dreena Burton recipe who bakes and blogs vegan and has a cookbook or two out.  You can find the recipe I adapted from on the link above for “these cookies”.  I’m calling them Almost Vegan because my point was for a healthier cookie, but I just used regular chocolate chips.  Without further ado—here’s the Almost Vegan Spelt Walnut Chocolate Chip Cookies.  I think they’re really good.  I had to keep tasting to see if they were and after three batches (about 60 cookies later), I decided they were good!  (No, I didn’t EAT 60 cookies!  Sheesh. ;) )

Almost Vegan Spelt Walnut Chocolate Chip Cookies, adapted by Katrina Smith from a Dreena Burton recipe

1 cup spelt flour (4 1/2 ounces) (I also tried them with 1/2 cup spelt flour and 1/2 cup white whole wheat flour—equally good and you could probably just use any flour you’d like)

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/4 cup Stevia In The Raw (also tried 1/4 cup Turbinado Sugar—also good.  Dreena uses Sucanat)

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/3 cup pure maple syrup

1/4 teaspoon molasses

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1/4 cup canola oil

1/2 cup semi sweet chocolate chips (Dreena uses grain sweetened chips)

1/3 cup chopped walnuts

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  In a large bowl, mix together flour, baking powder, baking soda, “sugar” and salt.  In another bowl, combine maple syrup, molasses, vanilla extract and canola oil and mix until well combined.  Add wet ingredients to dry ingredients and mix until just combined.  Stir in chocolate chips and walnuts.  Place spoonfuls of cookie dough on baking sheets lined with parchment paper and bake for 8 minutes.  I got 21 cookies, Dreena only gets 12!

The pictures of the cookies look slightly different because the top ones are with the mix of spelt flour and white whole wheat flour with turbinado sugar instead of Stevia and the bottom picture are the ones with all spelt flour and Stevia.  Both good but I do like the ones with turbinado sugar better, but if you’re going for less calories, try the Stevia.  The Stevia has just a slight aftertaste, but to me, not as unpleasant as other sugar free sweeteners and though I haven’t totally studied up on Stevia, it’s all natural and comes from a plant and has no calories. 

That said, I have also recently tried it with a brownie recipe I got from the Stevia website and I didn’t like those at all.  The brownies were very dry and cakey and I kind of knew while putting the recipe together that they just weren’t going to be very good.  They actually sat here for a few days, then I threw them out.

I should have tried Stevia in my favorite brownie recipe to replace some of the sugar.  I’ll probably still try that sometime.  I also made some peanut butter cookies (the almost flourless kind) and replaced some of the sugar in them with Stevia and I didn’t care for those either.  But I think that was more just the whole recipe and that I used a totally all natural peanut butter, which made the cookies really not very sweet at all.  Interesting thing was I personally didn’t like the cookies, but the kids ate them up!

That’s all for now!  Catch ya later.