Healthy Chocolate Chip Cookies

I love cookies. There, I said it out loud. I love cookies.

But I hate to bake (and cook). I only bake so I can have cookies (and brownies). I love sweet dessert things. If I could eat nothing but baked desserts, I would.

I have been visiting my sister in Southeast Asia. She is amazing. She founded (and runs) an animal shelter here on the Thai island (check out www.lantaanimalwelfare.com to see the great work the nonprofit does and how you can help). AND she founded and runs a cookie cooking school with guest bungalows, whose profits go to fund the animal welfare center. (Yes, my sister runs a cooking school and I cannot cook. How did that happen?)

I have discovered that ovens are not commonplace in this part of Thailand, so I haven’t baked for awhile. I make flatbread (with buckwheat flour) in a skillet and even tried to make oatmeal cookies in same skillet, but they didn’t turn out that good.

I do, however, have a counter top convention oven that I used for the second time tonight…to bake cookies. I was getting desperate. I hadn’t used the convection oven much before because it’s a little scary. It looks like a big crock pot with a ‘frog face’ on the top (see, the knobs are the eyes and the handle is the mouth). The heating unit is also on top only, so I was afraid that the cookies and other baked goods would burn on the surface and not cook all the way through.

I found this recipe on Chocolate Covered Katie. It worked pretty well and the cookies turned out surprisingly good. I didn’t have any white sugar (“someone” - me - forgot to buy more, so I used extra brown sugar for my cookies instead).

I also didn’t have cookie sheets so I doubled up a sheet of foil and placed on the rack.

Katie says to leave the cookies on the cookie sheet for at least 10 minutes after they are removed from the oven to let them continue to cook.

Well, since I didn’t have any cookie sheets, the foil ‘pretend cookie sheet’ didn’t have quite the same effect. However, the cookies were still delicious.

Enjoy Katie’s recipe and tell me how they turned out for you.