Elderflower Oat Cookies

Makes 20

As you well know, I am all for upping the nutritional profile of my family’s food at any given opportunity.  I’m all about flaxseed-this, superfood powders-that and added fruits and veggies here, there, and every-damn-where!  But sometimes, all you need is a good old-fashioned buttery sugary cookie to see you through the day.  The five-ingredient Elderflower & Oat cookies are sweet, simple, fragrant and perfectly crumbly.  These buckwheat biscuits are so easy to make in one bowl (especially for little sticky helping hands), and even easier to devour with a cup of tea for a mid-afternoon pick me up or after school sweet treat.  

The elderflower is of course, entirely optional, but given the fact that I just made 2 tonnes of elderflower cordial, I feel like it might be making an appearance in most of my dishes for the foreseeable future!  It brings such a gorgeous flavour to such a simple cookie and I think I might experiment with using the cookies as a great base for a cheesecake too, so stay tuned!

Each cookie provides 156 calories, 3g of protein and 2g of fibre.  They are gluten-free (although any flour would work well), and also refined sugar-free as I used Xylitol as a sweetener.  So my eternal quest to experiment with so-called healthier sugars continues and this week was with Xylitol, which is a low-calorie natural sweetener obtained from a variety of plants.  It looks just like table sugar and is just as sweet, but contains 40% fewer calories and I don’t find it has that weird aftertaste that Stevia does.  It also has a lesser effect on blood sugar levels than traditional sugar, due to its slow absorption rate.   So I think I will continue with Xylitol for the time being, does anyone else have any thoughts on it?  The good, the bad or the ugly?

INGREDIENTS

·     250g Butter (softened out of the fridge for 20 mins)
·     ½ tsp Baking Soda
·     115g Wholegrain Flour
·     290g Jumbo Oats
·     40 ml Elderflower Cordial
·     90g Xylitol (or any sugar of your choice) NOTE: if not using any elderflower cordial, increase this to 115g of sugar

METHOD

·      Pre-heat oven to 180 degrees.
·      Soften the butter for 20 minutes out of the fridge.
·      Whisk together the butter and the sugar.
·      Then sift in the flour and the baking soda, and combine well.
·      Then add the oats and the elderflower cordial. I then combined the mixture using my hands.
·      The mixture will be quite firm, so I flattened it out with my hands and cut shapes, but you could just flatten balls onto a greased parchment lined baking tray instead for ease.
·      Bake in the oven until golden, approximately 12-15 minutes.
·      WARNING! Do not try to move the cookies onto a cooling rack now.  Wait until they have hardened over 10 minutes before trying to move them otherwise they will just crumble.

NUTRITIONAL INFO

Calories – 176
Protein – 3g
Carbohydrates – 15g
Fat – 11g
Fibre – 2g