Dairy-Free Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

My mom had this really old cookbook from the early 80’s. I think it was called The Harrowsmith. There was this delicious oatmeal chocolate chip recipe in there, and these cookies quickly became part of my childhood. She would make them all the time, there’d be some when I got home from school, on lazy Sundays and of course she would make a massive batch to take camping.

She still makes them to this day and they have become a family favourite. One Christmas, she made me a little cook book with all our favourite recipes in it. I still use it a lot!

I stopped making these cookies when I started eating healthier and getting into fitness (I could never make them quite as good as my mom did anyway). They were way too sugary for me, and I could never eat just one.

When my kids hit school age I was looking for something tasty and non-processed to put in their lunches as a sweet snack. I looked at the cookie recipe again. It had A LOT of sugar in it. I figured I could make these a bit healthier. Plus, I wanted to eat them too! Unfortunately, I had recently gone dairy free, so I would have to do some tweaking. I experimented with different oils and sweeteners. It took me a few tries to perfect it, but I think I’ve finally got it down to a science.

These cookies are soooo good! They aren’t exactly low calorie, but they are definitely healthier than the original version. Plus they are unprocessed with only eight ingredients.

Here’s what I did to make the cookies a bit healthier:

The recipe calls for butter or margarine. Margarine is gross so I only ever use butter when I cook or bake. But since I’m dairy free now, I decided to try coconut oil. I tried different amounts, but finally settled on 1 cup being the best.

I thought that 1 ½ cups of brown sugar was WAY too much so I experimented with coconut sugar instead, The Jury is still out on whether coconut sugar is healthier than regular sugar, but it supposedly has a lower GI which won’t cause your insulin to spike as much. Either way, I cut back quite a bit. I use between ¾ – 1 cup of coconut sugar. Any less than that, the cookies seem to come out a bit drier.

I used whole wheat flour instead of white flour, and large flake oats instead of quick oats. Both of these have more fibre.

I use the Kirkland chocolate chips from Costco. They’re the only dairy free (reasonably priced) chocolate chips I’ve been able to find easily, plus the first ingredient is chocolate while all the other ones I’ve seen had sugar as the first one.

 

 

Dairy-Free Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe

1 cup of virgin coconut oil
1 cup of coconut palm sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
2 1/3 cup of large flake oats
1 ½ cups of whole wheat flour
2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt

Preheat oven to 350

Cream coconut oil and sugar. Beat in eggs and vanilla. Mix oats, flour, baking soda and salt, add to butter and sugar. Mix well, add chocolate chips.
Put dough in fridge for approx. 10 min. Roll dough into balls onto cookie sheet with parchment.
Bake for 10 minutes
Makes approx. 24 cookies

Other Tips

I don’t have any vanilla right now. It’s effing expensive ($35 at Costco when it used to be $8!!) and I refuse to buy the fake stuff. It tastes fine without it.

I found that when you bake cookies with coconut oil, they tend to burn a lot quicker on the bottom than cookies made with butter (that or my baking sheet is shit). The original recipe says to bake for 12-15 minutes, but with coconut oil I found putting it in the fridge for a bit and baking for only 10 minutes produced a better cookie.

These cookies are fantastic! Super easy to make and I actually feel good about putting these in my kids lunch. And they love them which is important! They’re also nut free (the kids’ school is nut-aware). But, I’m sure you could add other things like nuts, coconut, or raisins to them. I’m just a big fan of chocolate!

For those concerned about calories and macros, these have approximately 148 calories, 8.9g of fat, 16.7g of carbs (7.8 from sugar) 1.4g of fiber, and 2g of protein.

Enjoy!