Keeping healthy diet during Christmas may be difficult. All the sugar cookies, pastry, Christmas punch, meads, eggnog ... So how to make your Christmas days a bit healthier?
Baking alternatives
Classic recipes for Christmas treats are full of white plain flour, refined sugar and butter. But even those old recipes you love can be changed at least a little bit and can be made with healthier ingredients.
Of course, not all alternatives work for every recipe. Every "alternative" type of flour or sweetener has different consistency and the recipe needs to be adjusted - decrease/increase the amount of liquid, binder or raising agent.
Also if you change some ingredients in the recipe, the result may not be the same as if you used the original recipe. For example cookies without butter or sugar have always a little bit different texture.
Anyway these alternatives work in many recipes and even with these healthy ingredients you can create perfect Christmas sweets.
Anyway these alternatives work in many recipes and even with these healthy ingredients you can create perfect Christmas sweets.
Flour
I usually use spelt flour in all recipes with plain flour. For cookies I usually use buckwheat or oat flour and I always bake rye gingerbreads.
- Spelt flour - can be used for most of the recipes as white flour substitute
- Buckwheat flour - great for cookies and crepes, I recommend trying the recipe varion with buckwheat flour on a small amount first, to find out if buckwheat flour fits into the recipe. Pastry/sweets made of buckwheat flour are drier and the dough is a bit more flaky.
- Oat flour - can be made easily by blending regular oats. You can use it for cookies, muffin and some types of pastry.
Sugar
- Apple sauce - a great alternative of sugar, can be used in muffin, cakes or oat cookie recipes (not suitable for classic Christmas sugar cookies)
- Honey - you can sweeten almost any dough with honey - it can be used for cookies, gingerbreads, muffins, cakes, ... If you use a big amount of honey, make sure you decrease the amount of other liquids.
- Maple syrup - same usage as honey
- Coconut or palm sugar - these types of sugar are a bit healthier than cane or beet sugar, because they contain more minerals and vitamins. They can be used exactly like white sugar.
Butter
- Coconut oil - I usally use coconut oil in every recipe that calls for butter. It can be used in 1:1 ratio and the result has same consistency as if you used butter. For some recipes I still use organic butter - for butter cookies for example, but in any other recipe, coconut oil is my number one choice.
- Yoghurt - it can be used in cake, muffin or sweet loafs.
- Apple sauce - same usage like yoghur
- Avocado - can be used in 1:1 ratio instead of oil or butter in most types of baking goods. It has quite strong taste so it's not suitable for some recipes.
Eggs
- Grounded flax or chia seeds - just mix one table spoon of seeds with two tablespoons of water and let it sit for few minutes. These plant-based "eggs" can be used in most of recipes which call for whole eggs. Mletá chia nebo lněná semínka - stačí smíchat jednu lžíci semínek s dvěma lžícemi vody
Are you trying to follow healthy diet during Christmas? Or do you rather choose the traditional sweets?
inspiration for healthy Christmas sweets:
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