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The inspiration for today’s recipe came after I watched a video titled “The Healthiest Sweetener”. The video used a bar graph to compare 12 different sweeteners including things like white sugar, honey, turbinado sugar, agave nectar, etc., and I found it very interesting.

It was no surprise that most sweeteners have almost no health benefit at all. BUT, what was a surprise to me was that there were two sweeteners that DID have some nutritional value. They were represented by two giant bars on the graph, dwarfing all the others. Those two sweeteners were date sugar and molasses. I decided that if these two sweeteners had some redeeming value, then it might be nice to have a recipe where I could use them. And thus was born the Healthier Homemade Molasses Cookie. And it was good.

homemade molasses and date sugar cookies

Updating My Old Molasses Cookie Recipe

For these kind of new recipe situations, I usually don’t try to re-invent the wheel. Instead I just go to my recipe box, find something I’ve made before, and try to find new ways to tweak and update it with new ingredients. I dug out my old molasses cookie recipe and proceeded to make some new substitutions that were more plant-based. It took a few batches and some trial and error, but I’m happy with the version I’m sharing here today. Here are some of the switches I made:

Instead of butter – – > switched to Almond Butter
Instead of white flour – – > switched to White Whole Wheat Flour
Instead of eggs – – > switched to a flax egg replacement
Instead of white sugar – – > switched to Date Sugar

And of course the molasses was already in there, so the molasses gets to stay!

Date Sugar: The Trickiest Substitution

The most challenging change to make is the switch to date sugar. Date sugar is simply dried dates ground into a powder making it a healthier sweetener because the fiber and nutrition remain. However because the fiber remains, date sugar acts more like flour than sugar in a recipe. I’ve learned that once you stir in some date sugar, your dough will immediately thicken up. You’ll suddenly feel like – what the heck happened?? – as you struggle to keep stirring things around. My solution has always been to add some extra liquid to the recipe and I’ve done that with this molasses cookie recipe too. A bit of almond milk has been added to counter-balance the thickening properties of the date sugar.

In fact, I stir all my dry ingredients together first, and then set them aside. Then I stir together all the soft/wet ingredients. Then I gradually add the dry ingredients to the wet. This also helps offset the sudden introduction of date sugar by gradually adding it into a wetter mixture.

Making the Healthier Molasses Cookies

Finally, this cookie dough is a bit stickier and fudgier than a traditional cookie dough. This makes it a little harder to drop onto the cookie sheets for baking. I’ve found it very helpful to use a piece of moist paper toweling to pat the blobs of dough into a cookie shape on the cookie sheet.

I’ve also been in the habit of using my silicone baking sheets with cookies as they really do help to keep things from burning or sticking. However I did bake one batch of these cookies without the silicone sheets, and they still came out very nicely without sticking to the baking sheet.

Enjoy Your Two “Healthier” Sweeteners!

Even if you don’t make all the plant-based switches that I did, you can still give these cookies a try. For instance if you don’t have white whole wheat flour, you could just use white flour.

If you don’t want to do the flax egg replacement, you could just use an egg.

If you don’t have almond milk, you could just use regular milk.

But leaving the date sugar and molasses in the mixture will give you a way to have a go-to recipe for a sweet treat that you can feel a smidge better about because you’ve used the two sweeteners that are the best choices.

More Healthier Recipe Ideas:

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