Gluten-Free Spice Cookies with Chocolate

Looking for something to do with your kids on the weekend? Baking healthy snacks together is a great way to get them interested in being in the kitchen & cooking, introduce them to healthy baking and just spend quality time together! Here’s a great recipe to try. These cookies are gluten free (though no one will know if you don’t tell them!), full of aromatic spices, fun and easy to make… not to mention just plain delicious!

Ingredients

• ½ Cup Organic Butter

• 1 Cup Coconut Sugar (Packed Brown Sugar will work if you prefer)

• 1 large Egg or egg replacement

• 4 tbsp Fancy Molasses

• 2 tsp Pure Vanilla Extract

• 2 Cups Quinoa Flour (you can combine with regular flour if desired)

• 1 tsp each of Baking Soda and Baking Powder

• 1 tsp ground Ginger

• 2 tsp ground Cinnamon

• ½ tsp each of ground Cloves and ground Allspice

• Optional: ¾-1 Cup Pure Chocolate Chips (indulgence!)

• Optional: ¼ Cup Finely Ground Unrefined Cane Sugar (to roll dough in - extra indulgence!)

Method

• Preheat your oven to 350ºF (180ºC).

• In a large mixing bowl, cream Butter and Sugar together, then beat in Egg. Mix Molasses and Vanilla.

• In a separate bowl, sift together Flour, Baking Soda and Spices.

• Combine wet and dry ingredients until dough is smooth. Mix in Chocolate Chips if using.

• Note: Refrigerating the dough at this point for ½-1 hour helps with rolling.

• Roll dough into 1½” balls. Place Cane Sugar in a shallow dish and roll dough balls to coat.

• Place on greased baking sheet about 2” apart.

• Bake 8-10 minutes for soft cookies or 10-12 minutes for crisper ones. Remove from oven and let cool on wire rack.

• Cookies will puff up in the oven then flatten slightly while cooling.

• Store in a sealed container for 1 week. Cookies may be frozen for up to 4 weeks.

**A note on coconut sugar: Coconut sugar comes from the sap of coconut palm blossoms. It has a darker colour than regular white sugar, and is perfect for spice and/or chocolate recipes, as well as in sauces and marinades, but it can replace regular sugar in almost any recipe! Coconut sugar has a rich caramelly flavour reminiscent of brown sugar or molasses. What makes coconut sugar great is that it is a low-glycemic index sweetener (GI: 35 as compared to White Sugar: 80!), so it doesn’t spike your blood sugar levels like regular sugar does!

Enjoy!

Dr Katarine Holewa, ND