Traditional peanut butter cookies are loaded with sugar and fat, and that is what makes them so very tasty. Now, I’m not normally much of a peanut butter person, but the
occasional peanut butter cookie really hits the spot. Thing is, I don’t actually like all that extra sugar, and Sean can’t have it, so I had to replace it with something. Normally, the goal is to make the sweetener flavor pretty much disappear into the treat’s overall flavor. In this case, though, what is a more natural combination than peanut butter and honey? Well, you could make an argument for “jelly” or “jam,” but let’s face it, that would taste really weird, if not right out gross, in a cookie! So, I went with honey, and the light honey taste remaining in the final product really makes these cookies a treat.
Happy New Year!
As a kid, eggnog from the store was a holiday staple in my house. As a matter of fact, my younger brothers still get very distressed if there is no eggnog purchased at various points during the Christmas and New Year’s period :-). I liked it okay, but it was rather cloyingly sweet, and such a funny shade of yellow. I’d never made eggnog from scratch until after I met Sean. You see, though you occasionally run across a sugar-free eggnog in stores (though it isn’t common where I’ve shopped), it is nasty. Sean actually didn’t really remember what eggnog was, so I took a stab at making him some. I didn’t let it get hot enough the first time I tried it, so it didn’t thicken properly, but my attempts this past holiday season have thickened up much more nicely. So, here I share the fruits of my labor with you!
Now, traditionally
, stollen is made with some candied fruits and is covered in either powdered sugar or a powdered sugar glaze. For obvious reasons, this does not work for people trying to live sugar-free over the holidays! I do have something to confess: I had no idea what “stollen” was when my husband began to talk wistfully of the bread his family made every Christmas Eve (I realized later that I had seen the commercialized version of it that is usually sold in Germany–a German professor brought one in–but I didn’t realize it was the same thing when Sean was talking about it). However, he quite liked the tradition his family had concerning this bread, so I thought I’d give a shot to making it.
I’ve heard of a lot of things called “Santa’s Thumb Prints” , and most of them are tasty. The only thing the recipes appear to have in common is that they all have a circle of jam dropped into the center of the cookie. The ones my mother makes are nutty and a nice brown color; the ones I had at a party the other day (called “Santa’s Thumb Prints” by the lady who brought them) were more like a sugar cookie dough and were mostly off-white. Both were extremely tasty, and I’m sure you’ve probably run across many other things that go by this name that aren’t quite like either of these examples. One way or the other, here is a natural-sugar version of this holiday cookie. I guess it falls somewhere between what my mother makes and the smooth sugar-cookie variety in texture and flavor. You’ll just have to give it a try and let me know what you think of it :-).
This particular recipe is one of my better efforts in recreating pretty much exactly what Sean missed (and, for that matter, what I expect out of a good cinnamon roll!). They are not so syrupy as what you’ll get from the cinnamon roll place in your local mall, but quite frankly, having good fresh sweetbread makes it unnecessary to drown the roll in syrup. All that extra sweet is to hide how dry the roll is from being reheated so much. These are sweet and satisfying, and the cream cheese topping positively indulgent :-).
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Banana bread is one of the other things I reinvented pretty early on–there are always a few bananas that no one wants to eat that you have to do something with! In addition, Sean really likes to eat it for breakfast :-). Unfortunately, though Sean liked some of the versions I produced from recipes found on the internet, I didn’t. My tongue was accustomed to something sweeter and lighter. This isn’t quite identical to the “add two cups of sugar” version from my childhood, but I find it a very good compromise, since the whole wheat flour and natural sugars are much better for me! It is still moist, bouncy and banana-y, and really, what more could you ask for?
No, this does not contain any actual butter! I believe the name comes from the fact that you can spread it on toast just like butter–buttering with apples, as it were :-). More accurately, it is somewhere between apple sauce and jam or marmalade; you use it like jam (up to and including in a PB&J, if you like the flavors that way!), but it’s made of very very cooked apples, like applesauce. As a matter of fact, I will mark where you can stop in this recipe and have wonderfully tasty homemade applesauce.
This was one of the first sugar-free things I ever came up with. My then-boyfriend (now husband) was lamenting how he can never have apple pie, because the filling is nearly always mostly congealed sugar with apple bits in it. I went to the kitchen and created this, and he has loved it since the first bite! I figure that apples are plenty sweet enough to be tasty without all that sugar, so why add it? I think that this pie has a particularly spiced-cider kind of taste, which I really enjoy.
