Reduced sugar peanut butter chocolate cookies

Time for our next installment of sugar free / reduced sugar recipes for the holiday season.  Today we have a recipe that with one tweak makes two different types of cookies.  This one is reduced as shelf stable peanut butter by default has some sugar in it (4g in 2T / 30ml) which is about one cookie.  This recipe was originally in a church cookbook from where I grew up in D.C. and was called The Impossible Peanut Butter Cookie.  I have found it modifies to reduced sugar very easily and so I run with it.  If you leave the cocoa out you get the plain version, sugar substitutes exactly for the stevia if you want the regular version.

Ingredients:

1c / 237 ml of Stevia powder

1c / 237 ml of peanut butter

1 egg

⅓ c / 79ml Cocoa powder

 

Add the stevia and egg to a medium sized bowl and beat together.

Then fold and smash in the peanut butter, and cocoa powder.

I use a 1 ½ T / 23ml cookie scoop

to scoop them out onto a parchment paper covered cookie sheet–or in my case a pizza pan.  Smash them out as is tradition and pop them into the oven at 350F / 178C for 8 to 10 minutes.

Are they like eating fudge?  No, they are chocolatey but sadly far from fudge.  Warning they are a little dry and I have never found a way around that issue.

Let them cool for five or ten minutes as the flavor between hot and cooled is very different--plus hot peanut butter burns the inside of your mouth badly!

I have experimented with mix-ins like chopped up unsweetened bakers chocolate, various nuts, etc, but be careful not to overdo it or they tend to fall apart.

Bon appetite

Exercise is a dirty word. Every time I hear it I wash my mouth out with chocolate.
--Charles M. Schulz

Sugar free egg nog

Here we are once again in the Holiday Season. Fairy lights everywhere, ornaments in the trees, and enough cookies, cakes, pies, and festive drinks to easily throw a diabetic's blood sugar into orbit. So from the resident diabetic I’m going to try and post a series of no sugar added recipes this month starting with the nearly mandatory holiday drink egg nog. There are a cornucopia of recipes for egg nog on the web and in many cookbooks, but if you find them a bit off compared to the ready made store bought product you may find my version to come pretty close.

You’ll need:

1 package instant sugar free vanilla pudding (1oz/28g size)

3c / 710ml almond milk

1c / 237ml heavy cream

1t / 5ml cinnamon

¼ t / 1.25ml nutmeg

2T / 30ml rum (not the spiced stuff!)

Add your almond milk to a blender

Add the cream

Add your pudding mix

Blend on the “cream” setting for a minute or so, then while it is running add you cinnamon, nutmeg, and rum, and blend for another 30 seconds or so.

That’s it. If you let it stand for 10 to 15 minutes it will slightly thicken to that consistency we expect from store bought egg nog but with the double liquid it won’t become pudding.

Put it in your storage vessel, pitcher, serving glasses, or I guess you could just drink it from the blender–who am I to judge?

So how does this stack up in a 1c / 237ml serving?

Calories

Pudding 20 

Almond milk 22.5

Cream 200

Cinnamon 1.6

Nutmeg 0.75

Rum 16.17

For a total of 261.02 per serving

Fat per serving

Pudding 0.0g

Almond milk 1.9g

Cream 20g

Cinnamon 0.1g

Nutmeg 0.19g

Rum 0.0g

Total fat 22.19g

Sugar per serving

Pudding 0.0g

Almond milk 0.0g

Cream 0.0g

Cinnamon 0.0g

Nutmeg 0.0g

Rum 0.59g

Total sugar 0.59 g

Compared to a nationally available brand per 1c serving

Calories 343

Carbohydrates 34.4

Fat 19

As you can see my version is much more friendly on calories being 82 calories lower, 34 g ;ess carbs, and about the same on fat, but for a diabetic that 34g of carbs is massive!

Bon Appetite

“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”

― J.R.R. Tolkien