Applesauce trims fat in molasses cookies
I just can't help it. I see homemade cookies on a holiday table and I have a hard time focusing on the love that went into baking them and instead think about the fat and calories hidden in their crisp, colorful packages.
At any other time of the year when the aroma of cookies baking drifts through my home it sweeps me back to Grandmother Mauer's kitchen where, in the weeks leading up to Christmas, she'd bake hundreds of special treats.
When she was done, beautifully decorated cookies were packed edge-to-edge on gift trays. Sure they were colorful but my personal favorite was a plain-Jane cookie lost among the glittery sugar: her molasses cookie.
Granulated sugar made her molasses cookies sparkle, but compared to the other dressed-up cookies they appeared humdrum. Oh how looks were deceiving. Her molasses cookie tasted great with its crisp exterior yielding to a soft inside that exploded with molasses, brown sugar and cinnamon, ginger and clove.
Unfortunately, the 1½ sticks of butter that enhanced that cookie's delightful flavor also kept it out of my kitchen for years.
It wasn't until I'd become an experienced lean wizard that I decided to give Grandma's molasses cookies a makeover.
Cutting out all the butter produced dry, almost flavorless cookies. However, giving just half the butter the boot and substituting drained applesauce for the other half produced a cookie that delivered all its subtle flavor notes.
Still, those cookies didn't puff-up like Grandma's. An article in a professional baking magazine taught me that applesauce's slight acidity needs to be balanced with alkaline baking powder to inflate the thousands of air bubbles made by beating the butter, applesauce and sugars with carbon dioxide. This tweak made a big difference.
My slimmed down version of Grandma Mauer's cookies had a terrific soft and chewy center. Turns out brown sugar and molasses are hygroscopic a fancy term which means they absorb moisture out of the air which ultimately adds moisture when my cookies were stored for a day or two.
The leaner cookies had one other issue: it over-baked easily. Most times, I'd bake two cookie trays at the same time; rotating them halfway through their baking time. Most cookies bake perfectly using this switch-around technique, but the bottoms of these cookies got too brown on one pan and the cookies that started on the bottom rack didn't produce the attractive cracked surface like Grandma's. Baking one tray at a time solved this problem. When cookies look just a little raw in the cracks they're done.
These cookies are close to the ones my Grandma Mauer made and I think she'd approve of the trimmed down version. Give them a try … my holiday gift to you.
Ÿ Don Mauer welcomes questions, comments and makeover requests. Write him at don@theleanwizard.com.