Recipe for delicious but healthier double choc chip cookies. They’re made with a mix of butter and oil and include a reasonable amount of sugar, rolled oats and some wholemeal flour. It’s a slightly adapted version of soft bake choc cookies from Lorraine Pascale’s A Lighter Way to Bake. You’ll also find a review of the book.
Healthier Baking
As the title suggests, Lorraine Pascale’s latest baking book, A Lighter Way to Bake, is all about baking in a healthier way. It’s not about cutting out the treats, but reducing the amount of fat, sugar and refined flour in the sort of bakes we are familiar with.
As regular readers will know, I have baked with wholemeal flour all my life, so I was particularly pleased to see a TV chef catching up with the idea. Although I have a sweet tooth, I mostly bake at the lower end of the sugar scale.
But when it comes to fat, I am of the Weston A Price persuasion. That is to say, I don’t actually believe that good quality butter and eggs, where the livestock has free ranged on grass, is bad for you, quite the contrary. See my post on ingredients are the key. Eating too much of it, of course, may well be a problem.
A Lighter Way To Bake
This is one very dense book. Although it’s more or less the same size as Lorraine’s Baking Made Easy and is also published by Harper Collins, it seems to weigh a lot more. It does have 286 pages, which is about fifty more than her previous title, but I don’t think that accounts for it all. I like this feeling of weightiness and solidity in a cookbook, it gives me a sense of security.
It’s packed full of recipes and pictures. There are a hundred recipes covering breakfast & brunch, bread, savoury bakes, puddings & desserts, cakes, cookies & traybakes, teatime treats, special occasions and pastry.
Unusually, there is a picture for every bake covered, although not always on the same page. They all look very enticing and don’t have any of the annoying fading out shots, where you can only see part of the picture clearly. There is a particularly intriguing picture of a raspberry, vanilla & white chocolate cake with almond flowers that I am now keen to attempt.
There are also a couple of superflous pictures of the author, which always seems a bit odd in a cookbook. It’s good to have one good picture for interest, but I don’t really see the point of any extras. It does appear to be a modern trend though and I suppose there aren’t that many of them.
Rather strangely, the paper is very shiny, which can make it reflective when the lights are on and thus a bit difficult to read. The choice of print is also a bit odd, or rather the choice of colour. The print size isn’t that big and both the introduction to the recipe and ingredients are printed in pale red: I found myself squinting on more than one occasion.
Thankfully, the instructions are all in black. HarperCollins has chosen red is a key theme and it runs throughout the book. It’s the colour they use on some pages and for most of the utensils.
The Recipes
The recipes all look good and I’d be happy to make or eat most of them. There are a few meat and fish recipes included, which I skipped over fairly fast, but the savoury section had an equal number of vegetarian recipes in it, eight of each, which I found very pleasing.
I bookmarked the butternut squash naked bean burger with apple and mango chilli salsa as soon as I saw it. Being a bit of a squash fiend, I’m also rather keen to try the sweet potato, squash, apple and sage muffins from the breakfast section.
Having watched all the breadstick action recently on the BBC’s Great British Bake Off, the oregano & thyme grissini caught my eye in the bread chapter and I’m looking forward to trying them out next time I have friends around for a meal.
Lorraine has gone for healthy, but has made an effort that this should not be at the expense of taste. She has not cut out butter entirely, but often substitutes it, in total or in part, by oil or yoghurt. Ground almonds and wholemeal flour feature quite strongly and there is more emphasis on fresh fruit rather than dried.
Many of the recipes use only egg white or have a ratio of more egg white to yolk to omit some calories; what, I wonder, do you then do with all the egg yolks? I can’t bear waste, but it rather defeats the object of not eating them in the first place if you then make a massive amount of curd or custard.
Each recipe has a nutritional breakdown at the bottom of the page and gives a comparison to a more conventional recipe, although I have no idea which recipes those are. One of the almond blackberry and peach friands, for example, are 179 calories compared to 270. They also have 9.8g less fat, 5.5g less saturated fat, 4.4g less sugar, 0.1g more protein and 1g less salt.
Double Choc Chip Cookies
There were plenty of chocolate recipes to choose from, which is most definitely a good sign. The chocolate Guinness and blackcurrant cake is a must as is the chocolate, chocolate torte. But first, I decided to try out the soft bake choc cookies.
The only change I made to these was to use rapeseed oil rather than olive oil and a slightly higher quantity of wholemeal flour as my duck eggs were quite large. Well yes, there are the duck eggs too, I suppose.
The recipe said to divide the mixture into twelve, but I made sixteen large biscuits out of it.
The double choc chip cookies turned out beautifully and were quite large. They didn’t spread too much, but rose up quite considerably. Warm from the oven, they were crisp on the outside and soft and slightly chewy on the inside.
When they cooled down, they were soft on the outside too. Lorraine describes them as half way between a biscuit and a cake and I think she has that spot on. A whoopie pie by any other name. They were just the right side of sweetness, not overly sugared allowing for the chocolate to shine resulting in a really flavoursome biscuit.
Other Choc Chip Cookie Recipes You Might Like
- Chocolate chip avocado cookies
- Coconut chocolate chop cookies
- Coffee chocolate chip cookies
- Matcha chocolate chip cookies
- Peanut butter chocolate chip cookies
- Tiger nut chocolate chip cookies
Keep in Touch
Thanks for visiting Tin and Thyme. If you make these soft bake double choc chip cookies, I’d love to hear about it in the comments below. And do please rate the recipe. Have you any top tips? Do share photos on social media too and use the hashtag #tinandthyme, so I can spot them.
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If you’d like more cookie recipes, follow the link and you’ll find I have quite a lot of them. All delicious, of course.
Choclette x
Double Choc Chip Cookies. PIN IT.
Double Choc Chip Cookies – The Recipe
Double Choc Chip Cookies
Ingredients
- 75 g unsalted butter – softened
- 100 g light muscovado sugar
- 25 ml cold-pressed rapeseed oil (can use extra virgin olive oil instead)
- 2 large eggs (I used duck eggs)
- 110 g wholemeal flour
- 100 g unbleached plain flour
- 1 tsp baking powder
- ¼ tsp bicarbonate of soda (baking soda)
- 25 g cocoa powder
- 25 g rolled oats (porridge oats)
- 50 g milk chocolate chips (use dark chocolate chips for an even healthier version)
Instructions
- Cream the butter with the sugar until pale and fluffy.75 g unsalted butter – softened, 100 g light muscovado sugar
- Add the oil and beat some more.25 ml cold-pressed rapeseed oil
- Beat in the eggs, one by one.2 large eggs
- Sift in the flours, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda and cocoa powder.110 g wholemeal flour, 100 g unbleached plain flour, 1 tsp baking powder, ¼ tsp bicarbonate of soda (baking soda), 25 g cocoa powder
- Add the oats and stir until everything’s incorporated.25 g rolled oats (porridge oats)
- Stir in the chocolate chips.50 g milk chocolate chips
- Run some cold water over your hands then roll ping pong sized pieces of the mixture into balls between your palms.
- Place on a lined baking sheet and press down to about 1 cm in depth with your hands or the back of a spoon.
- Bake on the top shelf of a preheated oven at 180℃ (160℃ fan, 350℉, Gas 4) for about 10 minutes.
- Transfer to a wire rack and leave to cool – apart from one which you might just have to try warm.
Notes
Nutrition Estimate
Giveaway
The publishers, HarperCollins, are offering two Chocolate Log Blog readers a copy of Lorraine Pascale’s a Lighter Way to Bake.
The giveaway is now over.
Do take a look at my giveaway page to see if there is anything else you would like to enter.
I was sent a copy of A Lighter Way to Bake with no requirement to write a favourable review. As always, all opinions are my own. Thank you for your support of the brands and organisations that help to keep Tin and Thyme blithe and blogging.
Sarah says
Convenience food, I miss my home cooked meals
Alison Clark Clark says
Bread and butter is my down fall every time !
Beth Gurney says
I need to cut back on salt, sugar, fat.. most things that are bad for you that somehow I eat everyday!
Hannah Weetman says
Fizzy juice. I drink far too much of the stuff when I’m at home! xx
Carrie says
Cheese! Except I don’t want to because it’s so delicious!
Kerry Kilmister says
I would really like to cut down on Carbs as they make me so bloated.
jodie harvey says
id like to cut down on fatty food in general, although i am 37 weeks pregnant and plan to breastfeed so i do need some higher fat food but i dont think im a very healthy eater and would like to be 🙂
Fiona Mallard says
Crisps, I tend to sit and eat multiple bags if they’re in the house. The only way around it is not to buy any at all.
Emma Abdulaal says
For me it has to be naughty snacks like biscuits and chocolate. Now I’m breastfeeding I seem to eat junk while feeding 🙁
TehArhynn says
I would like to cut back on the fats in my diet most. I like to think that overall I’m a fairly healthy eater, and the carbs and sugars that I take in are the right ones, but when I splurge it tends to be in the less than stellar “fats” column.
Anonymous says
Always looking for a new recipe and I just found several on your blog. I can’t wait to try them.
I would love to have you to link up at my weekly Clever Chicks Blog Hop.
JaynesDen says
Processed Food. I want to cook more from scratch in the New Year.
Roz says
unhealthy sweet stuff I have the worst sweet tooth ever
Joe Lorena says
Cut back on carbs, cheese and everything sweet!
maddogs says
cheese, just can’t get enough of it!
Angela Wilson says
I need to reduce ‘candy’ chocolate and eat more luxurious dark chocolate
Julie says
definitely biscuits, have to eat the full packet when I start!
Katherine says
I’d love to cut back on refined sugar, at least in my tea, so I can still have it in my cakes 🙂
katherine wilcox says
I would like to cut down on sugar and fat
Karen Painter says
Cake, can’t resist a slice with my mid morning and mid afternoon cuppa!
Jo Glasspool says
Bread, I can’t walk past fresh bread without buying a baguette or crusty baps, x
Starry Eyed says
That’s a nasty question. I wouldn’t like to cut back on anything. However, I should cut back on chocolate because I eat far too much lol
mellysocks says
I eat too much of everything but I should definitely cut down on salt as I have high blood pressure.
Gill Bland says
I eat a lot of sugar, but aI don’t eat enough *good* full fat stuff. I’m afraid I’m a sucker for the marketing
Aimee R says
Sugar. I mostly prefer eating savoury anyway but recently I’ve began baking a lot more and eating a lot more sweet things!
Diane says
processed food, I really want to make more from scratch
GW78 says
Well it should be chocolate but it’s so tasty :/
saurus says
Microwave meals – workoing full time at times I live on them.
Lynn says
sweets, I just love sweets but they are so high in calories and do me no good at all but i love sweets
Cheryl Pasquier says
Calories overall, so fat and sugar would be a great place to start
Jean says
Thanks for a great review.
I have looked at this book on the shelves many times and thought I just don’t need another baking book. Now I’m not so sure !!
I absolutely agree about the gratuitous celebrity photos of the chefs in cook books these days, but I’m pleased to hear that all the recipes have photos, which is often a great help, especially in baking.
The thing I would most like to be able to give up is cake.
But it just isn’t going to happen !!
Jan says
I should like to give up more carbs.
Charlene F says
Carbohydrates, but I love them soooo much x
Laura W says
Carbohydrates. I eat far too many carbs and end up bloated and uncomfortable. I just love ’em so much…
Caroline says
I have a generally healthy diet but it wouldn’t do me any harm to refuse that last glass of wine at the weekend!
Choclette says
Don’t fight it 😉
Choclette says
Are you trying to cause me sleepless nights???
Choclette says
Noooooooooo!!!
Choclette says
Not the chocolate surely???
Choclette says
That is too shocking for words!!!
Kate@whatkatebaked says
This book had caugh my eye in the bookshop the other day- really in depth, extensive review, thank you Choclette! How are you getting on with the savoury recipes you bookmarked?
Choclette says
Hi Kate – haven’t managed to make any of them yet. Trouble is, my bookmarked recipes could take up several volumes all by themselves. What did you think when you saw it?
vohnmcg.com says
I have a fairly good balanced diet but because I love to bake, there are a few too many sweet treats – this book would be ideal to keep having them without piling on the pounds!
Angie Schneider says
Those cookies look very tempting! I like they are made with duck eggs.
Joan says
I’d like to cut back more on sodium without loosing flavor
lauren aroundtheworldin80bakes.com says
I really need to reduce the amount of sugar!
Anna Maria says
I believe you can have everything, in moderation.
Sarah Wyatt says
Salt – since I have started feeding my baby solids I’ve been amazed how much salt there is in the foods we eat!
Rosemary Emery says
Has to be Mayonnaise. I do love it. 🙂
Tracey Peach says
Biscuits because I often snack on them in between meals. Would like to find something with less calories