Cookies can be relatively healthy for you! This recipe involves hazelnut flour, butter, Splenda, and very little carbs or sugar. It is very tasty, too!

This recipe is super easy, and takes about 5 minutes to mix up. Then it's only another 10 minutes for cooking - and the cookies are ready!

1 1/4 cup hazelnut flour
1 cup Splenda
1/4 cup melted butter
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla
sugar-free chocolate chips

Start by pre-heating the oven to 350F. Mix together the hazelnut flour and the Splenda. Next, mix in the butter, egg and vanilla. Add in chips to taste. Put a piece of wax paper on a cookie sheet, and put 1" balls of dough onto cookie sheets.

Cook for 8-9 minutes. The aim here is NOT for them to get brown!! They should end up cooked - but not brown. Let them sit for a few minutes to settle.

Note that the cookies do NOT flatten out. They are going to be dome shaped. Plan accordingly.

These are REALLY really delicious. They're not going to be the texture of "sugar-filled cookies". They're going to be a bit gooey, and have a texture a bit like coconut. The flavor is great.

The benefit of course is that this recipe involves no sugar at all! Butter has zero carbs. An egg has pretty much no carbs - only 0.6g. The hazelnut flour is pretty much the only thing here with carbs, and it is far less than normal flour. All told, if you make about 12 cookies with this recipe, you still get less than 1g of carbs per cookie.

If you want to go with sugar-rich chocolate chips, you can do that - just check the carb count on the chips to see how much of an extra sugar intake you're adding to the recipe. Sugar-free chocolate chips taste pretty much the same, so you don't loose out on taste by using them, but sometimes it can be hard to find them at your local supermarket. It's well worth storing one or two in your pantry, even if it means ordering them online, so you have them ready in case you get that cookie craving.

Remember, it's fine to enjoy treats - the key is that treats should be healthy for you. Why fill yourself with piles of sugar and empty wheat flour, when you can have desserts that are just as delicious and are good for you, too!

Splenda Note: Technically, a cup of Splenda has 24g of carbs. This would mean you would add another 2g per cookies for the Splenda. However, most people do not metabolize the Splenda as a carb. That is, if I eat the Splenda-sweetened cookies, my body does not react to that Splenda presence by gaining weight. Like all things, each of us is different. My philosophy here is that you shouldn't be eating cookies every day. If you have a special treat of cookies, and you go with a nice low-carb version vs the high-carb version, you're already making such a big difference in your sugar intake between those two that the extra minor details are not worth stressing over.

Another option is to reduce the Splenda amount. We have made this recipe with 3/4 cup of Splenda and it tasted quite good.


Lisa Shea's Library of Low Carb Books