Chocolate chip cookies are a fun and easy treat to make at home. Plus, when you make cookies at home, you get to choose the best quality ingredients! Nutrient density is key. We can choose better ingredients (highlighted below), so that we balance out the sugar with extra nutrients and lots of healthy fats. This makes for wonderfully nutrient dense and healthy chocolate chip cookies.
How many steps can your kids do? You can involve your kids in every part of the recipe, from shopping to mixing to tasting. In fact, Tarek’s 13-year-old daughter is the one who developed this recipe! Have confidence in your kids, ditch the perfection, and make it about quality time.
Prep everything that you don’t want your kids to do in advance, so you can be present for them. Inviting kids to help in the kitchen is an excellent way to bond, teach skills, teach helpfulness, and just have some good ole’ fashioned fun!
During and after baking together, I like to reflect on the process with my kids while also adding in some teaching moments. Depending on their age, I might ask them questions like:
- The recipe calls for 1/2 cup of sugar and we only have 1/4 cup to measure with. How many ¼ cups should we put in?
- What do each of the ingredients taste like alone?
- Which step of the recipe did you like doing the best?
- Which step are you excited to do next time?
When we enjoy the cookies, you can bring mindfulness to the eating too:
- What flavors do you taste?
- What is your favorite ingredient?
Why You Should Bake These Nutrient Dense Healthy Chocolate Chip Cookies at Home
Remember that baking at home allows us to ditch the artificial ingredients at the store. It also helps us to cultivate a healthy sugar mindset in our kids. This means that we can educate them about the quality and quantity of sugar in the cookies while being mindful of both. The recipe below has about half the sugar that we see in most cookie recipes, and they taste delicious. At the same time, we choose higher quality sugars like organic brown sugar and coconut sugar. Ideally, we’d stick to more natural sugars in our Sugar Spectrum, but in this case, we think that the organic brown sugar really helps with the texture and rise of the cookies!
Also by baking healthier desserts together and not demonizing all types of sugar, we can try to avoid creating a harmful mindset of scarcity around sugar in our children. Sugar isn’t the enemy on its own. It’s really Big Food that’s the enemy. So we leave the store-bought cookies at the store and bake our own nutrient dense cookies at home. The alternative is to label all sugar as bad, and we believe this mindset of scarcity could lead to cycles of sugar abuse and addiction, especially when we’re not around.
So here’s our nutrient dense and healthy chocolate chip cookies recipe! Remember that the ingredients you use matter, and we’ve added a full shopping list below. We hope you have fun making these nutrient dense chocolate chip cookies with your kids!
Nutrient Dense and Healthy Chocolate Chip Cookies Recipe
Equipment
- Hand held or Stand mixer (or a wooden spoon and a strong, determined arm 🙂 )
- Unbleached Parchment Paper For Lining
Ingredients
- 3 cups organic all purpose flour
- 1 cup grass-fed butter, softened (2 sticks or 16 Tbsp)
- ¾ cup packed organic brown sugar
- ¼ cup coconut sugar
- 2 large pasture-raised eggs
- ½ cup organic dark chocolate chips, chunks, or chopped chocolate bar
- 2 tsp vanilla extract
- ¾ tsp baking soda
- ½ tsp baking powder
- ½ tsp salt
Instructions
- Cream together the softened butter with the organic brown sugar and coconut sugar.
- Add pasture-raised eggs and vanilla extract into your mixture. Beat until smooth.
- In a separate bowl, combine organic all purpose flour (using spoon and level method), baking soda, baking powder, and salt.
- Add dry ingredients into wet ingredients and mix until the flour is just incorporated.
- Finally, fold in your choice of chocolate. We like using mini chocolate chips for better distribution throughout the cookie.
- Chill the dough for 45 min to 24 hours before baking. (The longer you chill the dough, the more the flavor gets locked in.) You can also freeze part of the dough to pull out a week or three later and enjoy in batches.
- Form the dough into about 1” balls and space 1-1.5” apart on a baking sheet.
- Bake at 350°F(177°C) for about 12 minutes or until golden brown.
Notes
- Choose organic flour to reduce your exposure to glyphosate.
- Choose grass-fed butter for a healthier fat!
- Brown Sugar
- 365 Brand Organic Brown Sugar
- Thrive Market Organic Brown Sugar
- Get 40% off your first order at Thrive Market
- Coconut sugar
- Choose local, pastured eggs for optimal freshness and nutrients.
- Vital Farms Pasture-Raised Eggs
- Pasture Raised Eggs from a local farmer
- Dark chocolate has many amazing benefits!
- Vanilla extract
- Baking soda
- Choose a high quality mineral sea salt.
- Look for an aluminum-free baking powder brand.
This Post Has One Comment
Hello!
First, thank you for your hard work and time you out in the educate the rest of us!
Second, I made these cookies and they were bomb, but I wanted to make them a little healthier. So, I used 3/4 cup of organic coconut sugar and 1/4 cup of raw, organic honey (My in laws have bee hives, so we get our honey straight from the hive. We spin it and bottle it ourselves.) They turned out SO, SO good and extra healthy!