The Ultimate Feel-Good Cookie: A tribute to Nikki & Heidi

There is nothing bad for you in these cookies! We promise. Baking, chocolate and healthy rarely go together, but we think these cookies are worthy of their feel-good title. This is a good example of being creative and substituting ingredients for something you may already have in the cupboard. We often stray away from the original recipe if we have not got the right ingredients – happy accidents have frequently occurred this way.

Browsing 101 Cookbooks we stumbled across Nikki’s healthy cookies. Very keen to try them out but without having the coconut oil in the original recipe, we thought apple sauce might be a good substitute. Apple sauce takes Nikki’s cookies into the even healthier category! Just use dark chocolate and then you can smile with every mouthful. The ultimate feel-good cookie is a great pick me up because it can give you that boost of energy when you are lagging in the afternoon and has the added benefit of being completely healthy.

Charlotte definitely earned her guestamaker baker title with this recipe. She is not good with cup measurements so just threw the ingredients together until it looked about right – Jacs gently pointed out that not everyone cooks that way and she should try and give weights to encourage people to cook the recipes. Trying to write up the recipe using exact measurements is a completely new challenge for us as Charlotte tends to go by instinct instead of the scales and Jacs uses a mixture of cups and grams. Just be patient, we will get much better! In fact, Charlotte improved whilst cooking this recipe. At first she forgot to weigh anything at all, and then she remembered to weigh in grams but not in cups and vice-versa. Eventually, we managed to crack cups and grams by the time we got round to weighing the chocolate chips. Phew!

Just remember to feel no guilt with these cookies! We are going to try some different combos from the base of these cookies over the next few months – peanut butter, seeds, nuts, dried fruit…. But for now, try the basic feel-good cookie and smile : )

Prep time 20

Cook time 10-15

Makes 20-25 cookies

2 Bananas
2 Apples
200g / 2 Cups rolled Oats
50g / 2/3 Cup Ground Almonds
40g/ 1/3 Cup Shredded Coconut
50g Chocolate Chips
A pinch of Cinnamon
1 tsp Baking Powder

(If you have a slightly sweeter tooth, just add some extra teaspoons of honey or agave to the mix when stirring.)

Preheat the oven to 180˚C. Peel and cut the apples into small fine pieces. Simmer with some boiling water and cook until mushy. I often just finish pureeing the apples using a fork but you can make a finer apple sauce using a hand held blender.

Mash the two bananas and then add the apple sauce to this. It works best if you allow the apple sauce to cool slightly so it does not melt the chocolate! Add the oats, coconut, almonds, baking powder, and cinnamon and stir until well mixed. Lightly fold in the chocolate pieces. Spoon the mixture into small bite size dollops and place on a greased or lined baking tray. Bake until lightly brown, about 10-15 minutes, depending on how big your cookies are!

Charlotte & Jacqueline