The holiday season is upon us and with it is the onslaught of delicious sugary treats. We all know sugar is bad for us. The decades of scientific misdirection and advertising dollars by the sugar industry has left us with a legacy of a one thousand percent increase in diseases like cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, and osteoporosis. This is how much these
diseases have increased over the last 100 years – the sugar years. Add in the impact of the promotion of vegetable oils over the last 50 years and degenerative diseases have gone wild.
But does any of that matter when we see a lovely plate of holiday cookies or a box of candy? We may chastise ourselves for indulging when we know better, but our knowledge avails us not. Holiday treats speak right to our deep unconscious feelings of being loved. After all, what says love better than a plate of fresh hot cookies? How could love be bad for us?
I am sure there are probably 6 or 7 really strong willed people out there that will resist the call of holiday treats, but for the rest of us I offer a compromise. How about treats that are not quite as bad as the usual fare, but that taste like the real thing? I am talking about making your favorite treats, but using ingredients that are less damaging combined with a bit of moderation. One such ingredient is organic coconut palm sugar. It is still sugar, but it breaks down more slowly and therefore does not hit your system as hard. It has a glycemic index of around 35 – about the same as garbanzo beans. It contains valuable minerals and some fiber and tastes a bit like brown sugar. Another lower glycemic sugar is real maple syrup. Both of these can be used to make candy, while truly low to zero impact sugars, like the erythritol in my Dr. Dave sugar, can not. Erythritol recrystallizes after being heated blocking the candy making process. Other sugar alcohols, like xylitol and Maltitol, tend to generate a lot of bowl gas and loose stools, so they are not good candy making choices. Buy Coconut Palm Sugar here.
Other healthy choices for holiday baking include eliminating all vegetable oils from your cooking – so no margarine. Use real butter and/or coconut oil instead. Eliminating grain-based flour is also a great health choice. I suggest using almond flour, cassava flour, banana flour, flax flour, coconut flour, and sweet potato flour. A web search for paleo baking recipes will show you how to use these flours. Of course for baked goods needing sugar, my zero calorie Dr Dave sugar works wonders. Chocolate is a health food in its pure form, but the candy bars we eat the most tend to be only 10% chocolate and the rest sugar. Choosing chocolate chips or bars that are 60 to 70% cocoa mass are a much healthier alternative.
Here is a fun really simple recipe for fudgy chocolate frosting that could almost be called good for you. Just cook up a good sized yam until soft. Pull the skin off and mash up the hot yam with half to ¾ of a cup of dark chocolate chips until the chocolate melts. I like to whip it with a cake batter mixer. Let it cool and wham – you have delicious chocolate frosting ready to go on some almond flour cupcakes or brownies.
Lets try a candy recipe… caramels.
In a sauce pan mix 2/3 cup of coconut palm sugar with 1/3 cup real maple syrup and 1/3 cup heavy cream or coconut cream. Bring this mixture to a gentle boil and reduce heat to simmer-boil for 15 minutes.
After the time is up, add either 2/3 cup of real butter or 1/3 cup of butter and 1/3 cup of coconut oil and mix thoroughly. Pour into a small greased pan and put into the freezer for about an hour to set. Once set turn it out onto a sheet of waxed paper and cut it into bite sized pieces. Wrap each piece in waxed paper and keep them in a baggie in the fridge.
If you have ever made caramels in the past, you will see that this is a much easier recipe to follow. You don’t have to fuss with the cooking step making sure that the sugar does not form crystals. This is just one of the pluses in working with coconut sugar. Plus no nasty corn syrup is needed either.
Lets try another holiday favorite – pecan pie.
Rather than try to create a flaky pie crust with all the work that entails, I like to make a cookie dough crust out of almond flour and Dr Dave sugar. You can use the crust recipe for holiday drop cookies by adding dark chocolate chips or nuts or anything else you like.
Cookie Dough:
1/2 cup butter – softened – mix with
1/2 cup Dr Dave sugar
1/2 Tbs. Molasses
1/2 tsp. Sea salt
1 tsp. Real vanilla
1 egg – blend with a mixer until smooth then add
1 cup fine almond flour
1 cup cassava flour (option: use all almond flour)
Spread this mixture into a 9 inch pie pan and bake for 10-15 min at 350.
Pie filling:
1 ½ cups coconut sugar – mix in a medium sauce pan with
½ cup real maple syrup
¼ cup butter
2 tsp. Tapioca starch premixed with 1 Tbs. water
Bring this all to a boil then remove from the heat
In a separate bowl mix
3 eggs – beat till frothy and add
1 tsp. Vanilla
¼ tsp. Sea salt
¾ cup chopped pecans or macadamia nuts
Mix in the cooked mixture and ½ cup pecan halves
Pour this all into your partially baked cookie crust pie pan
Bake the pie 45 to 50 minutes at 350 degrees.
Serve once cool.
If you wanted to get really fancy, you could gently melt some 60 to 70% coco chocolate and dip some nuts or even small pieces of your caramels into the mixture.
Between the candies, pie, and any cookies you create you have some serious holiday cheer, but with much lower health damaging impact compared to their traditional counterparts.
We aren’t here to deny the joys of the holiday season or any other part of life. We are here to adapt to the realities of life and find ways to enjoy life anyway.