Betty Crocker Cookie Mix Recipe with Healthy Ingredients!

Hi all--

The 2008 finalists for the Betty Crocker Cookie Mix Recipe Contest have been posted, and can be found here on the website. You can vote for your favorite.

I looked over the recipes, and one caught my eye--"Wild Blue Energy Chews". They start with the oatmeal cookie mix, and add things like toasted wheat germ, egg whites, canola oil, etc., making them a little more nutritiously sound than some other recipes.

Here is the link - I made them for my biking class on Friday, and they got rave reviews. I did substitute raisins for the blueberries, and I didn't add chocolate to mine, but they were fabulous! Recommended highly--remember though, still lots of sugar and sodium. So enjoy one and give the rest away!

Easter Sugar Cookies

Poor Aaron stayed home again today with me--he still has a bad cough. Frankly, both of us were a bit blue, I was down due to frustration over this lingering bronchitis, and plus it hit me as I was reading some of my morning blogs I look at that I had done pitifully nothing for Easter for the kids.

Now, I don't consider myself Martha, where I need to handweave baskets for them and paint eggs using a brush I made from my horse's hair or anything, but I do like to do up the holidays a little. However, being restricted from my car for several days and basically confined to home has put a damper on my planning.



However, I remembered this morning that I had bought new cookie cutouts for spring, with an easter bunny and egg in the pack (a few more spring ones too, but we'll do those later). I also remembered I had broken down and bought a Wilton cake decorating set recently at a weak moment at Michael's when I thought I could be Martha. So, why not try them out! I used my standard sugar cookie dough recipe, but it holds up well, and doesn't need chilling beforehand (hence why it is my standard these days). It was given to my mom from her friend Suzanne. I wasn't up to anything tricky in the decorating pack, the next weekend when my mom visits we can do the spring cookies and try something fancier.





Easiest Sugar Cookie Dough



Preheat over to 350.

1/2 cup butter, unsalted
1/2 cup shortening
1/2 cup powdered sugar
1/2 cup sugar
Mix together and add 1 egg and 1 tsp vanilla (or almond if you prefer).
Sift 2 1/2 cup flour with 1/2 tsp. cream of tartar and 1/2 tsp salt. Add dry ingredients to the creamed mixture.

Roll out to about 1/2 inch thick, and bake the cut-outs for about 8 to 10 minutes at 350.




Here's Aaron helping make the dough! Notice his M&M apron - he is quite the chef!








Here they are coming out of the oven (Aaron is hiding under the counter from the camera!)





Here we are decorating! I used a buttercream frosting.








Here are our finished products--not too bad! HE was in charge of the blue sprinkles, I was in charge of the yellow outline.

Quest for homemade Graham Crackers

Well, I was reading the oxygen website and they posted that graham crackers are OK on occasion as clean eating (see here!). This excited me like nothing lately--wow, graham crackers as eating that is allowed, and not even really a treat! Yeah!

So, of course the obsessive part of me decides that I won't eat just any graham crackers, that it would be better for me to make my own, so I could control the ingredients and make good substitutions as appropriate.

The first one I tried a few weeks ago, based on this one on baking delights. Instead of white flour, I used whole wheat pastry flour, substituted smart balance stick butter for the butter, used 1/4 cup splenda brown sugar blend, and substituted agave instead of honey. The results were a very good flavored cookie, but I personally could not get it rolled out into anything that looked decent. I'm not sure if I did not refrigerate enough. Or it might have been the whole wheat flour substitution.

Next, I tried this one yesterday. Now, I liked the idea of this one because it used canola oil, and molasses for flavor, with little sugar. I did make it using graham flour, water, but soy milk does sound good. Now, I really liked the taste of these, and you didn't have to refrigerate the dough, but personally I couldn't roll them out right again. They turned out good, just very mis-shapen! I won't even post the pictures! But, Aaron ate them right up, as did I! I might have had problems because I used graham flour, which is courser than whole wheat, so I might try these next time with whole wheat.

So, I decided to look on Hodgson Mill website for a recipe, and found this one that is posted for cooking on a pizza sheet - perfect! The recipe was similar as others, and I made similar substitutions (canola oil for butter, whole wheat flour for white flour, agave for honey). Taste was good, and pressing out into the pizza pan was much easier. I didn't get it to cover the whole pizza pan though.

The bad news: Everything was going so well! But, I didn't keep a close eye on this batch and they got too brown!!!! Drats, oh, well, luckily I have the ugly ones left over from yesterday to comfort me. I'll try again!