A few weeks ago my friend Verushka, who moved to Seattle last year, came back to NY for her brother’s birthday. She was only here for a few days and I only got to spend a few hours with her, but boy did we cram a LOT into those few hours!

One of the main things she wanted to do was watch me make my sugar-free meringue cookies. I was hungover that day and wasn’t really in the mood to cook so early in the morning (okay, it was like 11:30 when she called), but there was no way I could say no to the girl who got me one of the most thoughtful gifts ever:

So I picked her up around noon, and after a quick trip to the supermarket we headed back to my place to start baking. In addition to wanting to make meringues, she also wanted to bake cookies for her brother’s birthday, which was that same day.

I’ve never actually made cookies from scratch before, so we decided to go with a recipe she already knew (Chocolate Chip and M&M Cookies) and try to “healthify” it up – you know, use whole wheat flour instead of regular flour and coconut oil instead of butter. We did a google search and found THIS recipe, which turned out to be delicious.

If I’d been making the cookies for myself I would have used made them sugar-free using Truvia, but since these were for her brother we used brown sugar instead. And really, even with the brown sugar, they STILL could have been classified as “healthy cookies” – if we had stopped right there.

But we didn’t. We added chocolate chips, walnuts and Reese’s Pieces, which of course made these cookies 100% UNhealthy. 🙂 But man, were they delicious. As soon as I get off my no-carbs diet I’m going to try to make this recipe completely sugar-free. But in the meantime, here’s the recipe we made.

Healthy Homemade Cookies
(with whole wheat flour and coconut oil)

Ingredients:

• 2 cups whole wheat pastry flour
• 1/2 cup coconut oil
• 1 and 1/2 cups brown sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon sea salt

See? When you look at the above ingredients, the recipe really is kinda healthy!

• OPTIONAL – chocolate chips, walnuts, Reese’s pieces. We used 1/4 cup of each.

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 375 and line a cookie sheet with parchment paper.

2. Mix the oil, eggs, vanilla, sugar and salt.

3. Add the flour, baking soda and baking powder.

4. Mix in the optional ingredients.

5. Spoon the cookies onto the cookie sheet. Make sure you leave space, because they grow when they cook! (Which I really wasn’t that aware of, which is why my cookies were too close together and which is why I ended up with the Mickey Mouse cookie in the first picture above.)

6. Bake for 8-10 minutes (closer to 10, really).

7. Remove from the oven, let them set for a few minutes and then transfer to a cooling rack.

8. That’s it! Try to wait for them to cool down, and then enjoy.

You may be thinking that they look kind of dry. That was my first thought when they were done and I went to take pictures for this post – “Oh shit, we overcooked them.” But trust me, they weren’t dry at all. They were awesome. And my Mickey Mouse cookie worked out after all: