High-protein cookies

[eruthros]

This is my attempt to turn a cookie into a more proteiny snack, without losing any of the flavors I like in a cookie. I like my cookies more substantial, so then when I have one for a snack it really does hold me til dinner!

The current recipe makes about 40, depending on size, and has about 4.5 grams of protein per cookie. (For reference, a Luna bar has about 7-10 grams protein per bar.)

Ingredients:
8 oz of unsweetened applesauce (I buy applesauce for baking in the little individual-serving 4-oz sizes; if you're measuring, it's about 1 cup)
2.5 Tb butter, melted
0.5 cups cane/turbinado/granulated sugar
1 cup brown sugar

5 medium eggs (or 4 large or 4 extra-large)
1 Tb of vanilla extract or to taste

1 ts baking soda
1.5 cups flour (I've been using half whole wheat pastry, half spelt lately, but whatever you have around should work)
1.25 cups soy protein powder (If you can't find unflavored, vanilla works fine)
.25 ts salt (reduce if you use salted butter)

2 cups medium-shred coconut (this plus the egg holds the cookies together; the final cookies taste very little like coconut)
2 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips
1 cup slivered almonds (or more! almonds are the expensive part of this recipe for me, but it's tasty with 1.5 cups almonds too)

Directions:
Preheat oven to 375*.

1. In a large bowl, "cream" the applesauce, butter, and sugars. It will seem a lot more liquidy than creamed butter+sugar, but don't worry about that, it's supposed to.

2. Beat the eggs and vanilla into the creamed sugar mix.

3. In a separate bowl, mix together the baking soda, salt, flour, and soy protein powder.

4. Add the dry ingredients to the wet and mix until smooth.

5. Add the coconut, chocolate chips, and almonds. Mix until the chocolate chips etc are well-distributed.

6. Adjust if necessary! If the batter looks a little bit wet and feels a little bit tacky and sticks to your fingers, that's fine -- that allows the soy protein powder to not taste chalky. If it's still fairly liquidy, though, your soy protein powder might not be as drying as mine; you can add more flour if necessary.

7. Form drop cookies with a spoon and cook in a 375* oven for 10 minutes or until a little bit browned on the top edges. There's almost no butter in them, so they may stick to a cookie sheet -- I use baking parchment or a silicone mat, and that's fine, but without those they might stick a little.

8. Pretend they're breakfast! Nom.

Some variations! So, the nice thing about this recipe is that the eggs + applesauce + coconut is incredibly binding, so it's easy to mess around with the rest of the ingredients. Some things I have done:

1. If you use all butter instead of applesauce, suddenly the cookies will taste chalky -- butter doesn't cover the flavor of soy protein powder as well as applesauce does. So if you want to make them with all butter (which is pretty nom), try reducing the protein powder to half a cup or so.

2. Running out of flour? They will hold together even if half the flour is replaced by non-gluteny things. I've put in almond meal, wheat germ, quinoa flour, etc. (I've never tried them gluten-free because I don't have potato starch or similar, but the way they'll hold together with just .75 cups of flour suggests that it would be a pretty easy swap.)

3. If you dislike coconut, quick oats work too, but not quite as well.

4. I have some days where I can mix cookies but can't chop almonds -- then I put the almonds in a blender and give them a couple quick pulses. They'll come out with some almond meal and some larger bits, but otoh no knives.

Comments

[gramina]

Thanks! I'm asking my sister, who's "on the ground" with my mom (who has Alzheimer's), if she thinks those are something Mother might eat -- we're having trouble getting her to eat, and it's like all the years in which she didn't eat sweets b/c she didn't care for them are snapping back, and dessert is her favorite part of the meal. Occasionally, it's the *only* part of her meal, I think. :( ((I could be wrong about that, being not-the-one-on-the-ground; I'm just going by the sense I get from e-mails.))

The tl;dr version is: I'm actively looking for recipes for things that taste like cookies but are actually as close to healthy meal-substitutes as possible.

[eruthros]

I know the feeling -- when my grandma's Alzheimer's got really bad, I think she only ate truffles. :( It's a hard place to be!

Based on my experience with my grandma, I might suggest leaving out the almonds (depending on how well your mom is eating generally), because they can be a choking hazard -- the chocolate chips melt, so they're not generally a problem. These are also not uber-sweet, because I like my cookies medium-sweet, but they'll easily take another quarter-cup of white sugar if that makes them more appealing.

I hope that you have good luck finding recipes!

[azurelunatic]

Do you have some suggestions for a non-soy alternative? I have an aunt who is sensitive to soy, but has been experimenting with high-protein cookie type things.

[eruthros]

People tell me that you can use whey protein powder in exactly the same way as soy in baking, but I haven't tried it yet -- I plan to in the next batch, now that I've finally run out of soy protein powder!

[killing_rose]

I use rice protein powder and haven't had any problems with it. (I like not killing myself. So no soy for me.)

[amalnahurriyeh]

Depending on how much other flavor there is in the cookie, you could try garbanzo bean flour. I do GF baking, and I've used it in place of/swapped for half of soy flour before. The one thing is that the dough has to be otherwise very flavorful, or your cookies will taste like hummus, and that is a bad bad thing. (But I just made peanut butter cookies tonight that were half garbanzo and half rice flour, and they turned out quite yummy.)

[eruthros]

Oh, that's a very cool idea! I've done part-quinoa flour part-almond meal, where I expect the almond to cover the quinoa taste (which I'm not a big fan of), but garbanzo flour is a very neat idea!

[monanotlisa]

Nice concept, and thanks for sharing! I'm sure vegetarians especially will approve. :)

[greenbirds]

I'm sure vegetarians especially will approve.

Thumbs up for sure! :D I may be baking tonight.

[torachan]

Yum! I will definitely have to try these!

[amalnahurriyeh]

Omnomnom indeed! I have a picky underweight toddler at the moment, so things like this are a very good idea to have in my mental cooking shelf. Thanks!