(Practically) Healthy Lemon Cookies!

Hello,

For those of you who don't know this, Oliva is my best friend and the person this (kind of) bakery is named after. She is always challenging me in everything I do and the absolute light in my life. Recently, she has been put on a no dairy no sugar no gluten diet which makes sweets hard to eat because they tend to have at least one of those, if not all three, which is upsetting because she also loves a good dessert. She had been eyeing these lemon cookies she saw on Pinterest (which I didn't realise were already in compliance with her diet) and I'd been saying for months that I wanted to mess around with things she could eat and make something delicious so what better a time then now to try it out? It took a little brainstorming but I got to a recipe that I thought might work with almond flour, coconut oil, and monkfruit sweetner, so then it was test kitchen time! All of you on my snap chat know how that went, the first one was gross so I threw baking soda out of the mix. The second wasn't as bad, but it kept spreading. Fridging the dough didn't help at all, they all just ended up spreading in the oven. I needed less liquid so instead of lemon juice and zest, I only did zest. Cornstarch was a no go to make it stiffer, it detracted from the taste. Finally I hit on a combination with baking powder and less coconut oil that worked out well! She asked for soft and chewy and I managed to get the soft part (it stayed soft after cooling) but the chewy part wasn't going to happen because of the flour. It ended up being a slightly shortbreadish texture but lighter. Melt in your mouth is a good way to put it. I'll talk a little more about the different types of flour and fats at the bottom of the recipes should you want to read :).

I love you Oliva, I'll try and make this recipe as precise as I can. I know how you love exact measurements.

TMADJJ

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Practically Healthy Lemon Cookies Yields 24 cookies

Ingredients:

1 egg

zest of 2 lemons

2/3 cup monkfruit sweetner

7 tsp coconut oil (can't be wet, has to be the congealed version. If it's not, stick it in the fridge until it is)

1 1/2 cups almond flour

2 tsp baking powder

1.5 tsp vanilla

salt, you're going to have to trust your instincts on this part

Recipe:

Okay. You got this. Preheat the oven to 300°F. Also you need an electric whisk for this because I tried it with a handheld one and I think that's part of the reason the first one looked like cake batter. In a bowl, combine the coconut oil and monkfruit sweetner and whisk until it looks fluffy. Next, add the vanilla and egg and whisk again until it looks a pale yellow and still pretty fluffy. If it's liquidy, the oil wasn't solid enough. In a separate bowl, mix the almond flour, baking powder, and a little salt (or keep the salt until the end and then add it to taste). Pour in the wet ingredients and whisk those together. With a spatula, combine the lemon zest into the dough. The reason for the spatula is you want to gently fold it to keep as much air in there as possible. Create small balls about the size of a waterbottle cap and lay them relatively far apart from each other on a baking sheet, because remember they spread. Bake them for ten minutes. What you're looking for is the middle not to jiggle but it will look not completely done when you take it out. Basically right once that middle is no longer liquid you're good to go, which should be just at the ten minute mark. The edges may brown slightly but we aren't looking for a golden brown because of the monkfruit sweetner and the fact that this is a sugar cookie base. Let them cool for about ten minutes and then they should hold their shape and be ready to eat!

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About the flour and fat!

So here's the tea. Different flours have different levels of protein which is why you may use all purpose flour for most things but a bread flour for bread or cake flour for cake. Cake flour has a lower protein content, around 9%, which is good because lower the protein, the less gluten that will form. Gluten is what makes something stretchy and chewy, so it makes sense that bread flour has about 13% protein. All purpose runs at around 11% which is what makes it so versatile because it's kinda in the middle of all of these. Also, the higher the protein content, the heavier the dough will be. The choices for gluten free flours for this recipe were coconut (18%) and almond flour (6%). So coconut would have made a very dense cookie whereas the almond made it light and airy. Unfortunately, it also added to the crumbly texture because absolutely no gluten was made and so therefore we also couldn't get a chewy consistency.

On the fat side of things, usually one uses butter. The fat content in butter is around 80% with the other 20% being water. Coconut oil is 100% fat which means those were not going to act the same. To make 100% equal 80%, you have to use considerably less coconut oil which is what the problem was with the first batch I made. Coconut oil also has a lower melting point (75°F) than butter (95°F) so it is going to cook faster, hence the 300°F oven rather than the usual baking temp for cookies at 350°F.