To be honest, eating healthily can be a bit miserable, especially if you’re trying to cut back on sugar. Yes, refined sugar is pretty damn bad for you, but also it’s in basically absolutely everything you can buy in a packet: cereal, pasta sauce, chocolate, nutella, biscuits. I even found some in some cottage cheese the other day. As students, it’s not easy nor is it budget friendly to be buying nothing but fresh ingredients everytime we go to ASDA. It’s not really possible to cut out all the refined sugar from your diet, and, quite honestly, going cold turkey and cutting a food item out completely isn’t probably a good idea anyway. Instead, eating healthily is about making alternative, healthier choices with the food that you put in your body.
I found this recipe for chewy oat and sultana cookies from Deliciously Ella, and I’ve found that they make an awesome snack for those mammoth library sessions that I seem to be doing more and more of lately. If you spend as much time on Pinterest as I do, you’ll probably have noticed that a lot of health food bloggers use really obscure ingredients in their recipes, like coconut sugar or gram flour or something else that a) I can’t afford, and b) ASDA definitely do not stock. What’s awesome about this recipe, however, is that it’s super healthy, but uses really simple, cheap ingredients that you’ll probably have in your kitchen anyway. And, the bonus is that they’re awesome cookies. They’re great for a sugar boost in the middle of your essay, to grab before running off to a lecture, or even to eat for breakfast with a banana.
Ingredients:
– Two (ripe) bananas
– Two apples
– 135g of porridge oats
– 75g of sultanas
– 3 tbsp of honey
– 2 tsp of cinnamon
This makes about 10 cookies. If you’re not into sultanas, you could substitute them with any dried fruit. You could also put in a teaspoon of nutmeg and/or a teaspoon of ginger, or even a bit of nut butter to make the cookies even more gooey.
Method:
1. Preheat the oven to 200 degrees celsius.
2. Grate the apples: this can be a bit challenging and messy, but persevere! You can peel them before you grate them if you like, but you don’t have to, and you should end up with a watery pulp. Grab a sieve and strain the pulp through it to remove the excess water.
3. Mash up the banana, and then mix it with the grated apples.
4. Add in the oats, the honey, the raisins, and the cinnamon, and any other spices that you want to use. Mix it up, and you’ll get a nice batter. Feel free to taste it at this point to see if you need any more honey or spices – try really hard not to eat the whole bowl!
5. Using a spoon, scoop out the mixture and form them into biscuit shapes on a greased baking tray, or on a tray lined with baking parchment. I got about nine cookies from this mixture. Try and evenly distribute out the sultanas between the cookies.
6. Bake! They should take about 30 minutes, and take them out when they’re golden brown. They should be a sticky, chewy texture.
7. Let them cool, and then enjoy.
You can store these in an airtight container in the fridge for about a week. Happy baking!