I weighed myself recently and discovered that the kilos have been creeping up. All the baked goods were to blame for sure. So when I saw this recipe on Orangette, I got excited. It only had four (!!!) tablespoons of butter and included plain yogurt – how healthy! And the cookies looked delicious. I decided that I had to bake these, and went in search for the original Alice Medrich recipe (Orangette had adapted it slightly). I discovered that each cookie only contained 78 calories. If you’re watching your weight and craving something deliciously chocolatey and decadent, then this recipe is for you.
After making Babycakes vegan double chocolate chip cookies, I was inspired to try to make these even healthier by using coconut oil instead of butter. So I split the dough in half, making half with butter and half with coconut oil. Coconut oil is said to speed up your metabolism, bypass your fat stores and have many other health benefits. And so the experimenting begun!
CHEWY COCOA COOKIES
Adapted from Alice Medrich’s Cooking Light.
Try using your kitchen scales when baking! It makes life very easy and turns this recipe into a one-bowl affair. Just put a bowl on top of your scales and tare them to zero. Makes for super-precise measurements and perfect cookies!
1/2 cup plain flour (70g)
1/2 cup wholemeal plain flour (70g)
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
57 g unsalted butter or coconut oil
2/3 cup white sugar (133g)
1/3 cup brown sugar (73g)
5 tbsp cocoa (35g)
1/3 cup plain yogurt (90g)
1 tsp vanilla essence
Preheat the oven to 180 degrees and line three baking trays with baking paper.
Melt the butter or coconut oil in a large ceramic bowl in the microwave. Add the sugars and mix well, then sift in the cocoa and stir until combined. The mixture will be quite pasty at this stage. Add the yogurt and the vanilla and mix well.
Finally, add the flour, baking soda and salt, and stir to combine.
The original cookie recipe doesn’t use any chocolate, but I chopped up a bit of dark chocolate and added it into half of my dough just to see what happened. If you want to add chocolate and/or nuts, add about 1 cup to the dough now.
Drop tablespoons of dough onto the lined baking trays, leaving room for spreading.
Bake for 10 minutes until the tops of the cookies are cracked slightly and look set. Let them cool on the baking trays as they are very delicate when warm.
The cookies above are made with butter and chocolate chips.
These cookies are made with coconut oil.
Both cookies are delicious. The ones with coconut oil spread a little more than the ones with butter, and they had a slight coconut flavour.
I preferred the butter ones (even though the coconut oil ones are healthier!) and the version that had chocolate chips inside. They are fudgy and luscious and chocolate-filled and chewy. They didn’t last long in my house (a matter of hours), so eat fast. Yum!
