Healthy Holiday Cookies – Coco-nutty & Cute!

Everyone loves eating during the holiday season! There is so much festive food… but it’s often unhealthy. However, we love baking cookies… so we transformed the standard with some fantastic substitutes and created these amazingly healthy (and cute) Coconut Sugar Cookie Cutouts!

Our Healthy Christmas Cookies.JPG


For the past three years we have been inventing healthy cookies for family on Christmas Day. This year we visited the local health food store (in Melbourne) and discovered an explosion of coconut products…oil, sugar, flour, fibre and butter. Regular cookies are made with too much white flour, butter and cane sugar, so we grabbed some alternatives and rushed home to begin!

We mixed our ingredients into a dough, substituting half the dairy butter with coconut oil, half the white flour with coconut flour (for the other half we used whole wheat) and all the cane sugar with coconut sugar.
We put the dough into the fridge to cool, but when we were ready to begin it had become crumbly and dry! After a quick Google search we discovered that coconut flour behaves very differently to white flour (because it is not a grain) and is highly absorbent – thus explaining our three batches of dried up dough!

We added another couple of eggs to each batch and thankfully it worked out! The dough rolled smoothly, baked up nicely and tasted great. With all the new ingredients they were quite coco-nutty…. and the coconut sugar has a delicious caramel flavour, definitely adding to the yumminess. They were really satisfying to eat (and super fun to decorate!).

Here are the recipes!

Christmas Spice
Coconut Sugar Cookie Cutouts

  • 1/3 cup butter
  • 1/3 cup coconut oil
  • 3/4 cup coconut sugar
  • 1 tsp baking powder
  • 3 eggs
  • 1 tsp cinnamon
  • 1 tsp vanilla
  • 1 cup whole wheat flour
  • 1 cup coconut flour
  1. Beat butter and coconut oil with an electric mixer for 30 seconds.
  2. Add sugar, baking powder and a dash of salt. Beat until combined.
  3. Beat in the eggs, cinnamon and vanilla.
  4. Beat in as much if the flour as you can with the mixer and stir in any remaining flour. Chill; covered in the fridge for 1 hour.
  5. Preheat oven to 180C. On a lightly floured surface roll a portion of the dough until it is a bit more than half a centimeter thick. Cut out the cookies and place them on a greased cookie sheet.
  6. Bake for 7 to 9 minutes or until the edges are just starting to brown. Let them cool for a minute and then transfer them to a wire rack to cool completely.

Christmas Chocolate
Coconut Sugar Cookie Cutouts

  • 1/3 cup butter
  • 1/3 cup coconut oil
  • 3/4 cup coconut sugar
  • 1 tsp baking powder
  • 3 eggs
  • 1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
  • 1 tsp vanilla
  • 1 cup whole wheat flour
  • 3/4 cup coconut flour
  1. Beat butter and coconut oil with an electric mixer for 30 seconds.
  2. Add sugar, baking powder and a dash of salt. Beat until combined.
  3. Beat in the eggs, cocoa and vanilla.
  4. Beat in as much if the flour as you can with the mixer and stir in any remaining flour. Chill; covered in the fridge for 1 hour.
  5. Preheat oven to 180C. On a lightly floured surface roll a portion of the dough until it is a bit more than half a centimeter thick. Cut out the cookies and place them on a greased cookie sheet.
  6. Bake for 7 to 9 minutes or until the edges are just starting to brown. Let them cool for a minute and then transfer them to a wire rack to cool completely.

Then you can decorate them however you choose! We made a traditional royal icing to give our cookies their cute faces, but next time we might try and come up with a more nutritious version. But for this year – ENJOY!

4 thoughts on “Healthy Holiday Cookies – Coco-nutty & Cute!

  1. I’ve been watching Rosa Park, Chihiro Uchida, Chen Peng, and Kenya Nakamura dance for years on SDT and when I saw both of your names for a Nutcracker performance, I was slightly disappointed that it wasn’t the regulars I know but after seeing both of your performances, I wanted to kick myself for judging too soon. Both of you had the same level of talent, skill, and charisma as the four above mentioned artistes. In fact, I shouldn’t discriminate at all, the whole company was exuding the same energy. =D

    I also want to blame myself for not reading the programme book better as you two have been in SDT for the past three years so I should have found your names familiar. I apologize for my blunder but both of you are now among my favourite dancers to watch in SDT. I was very glad that you two were promoted this year and I look forward to seeing more performances from this lovely adorable couple. ^_^

    That aside, I would like to ask if both of you have tried the durian fruit before? I know it’s an acquired taste and not many people may like it.

    • Thank you so much for your message!
      We really appreciate your lovely comments and are so glad you enjoyed our dancing. It means a lot to us!
      Durian! No, we have not tried fresh durian – however we DID buy a chempadak one time, out of curiosity, which is similar, we think?
      It was an experience – messy and stinky, but the flavour was okay… we cut & ate it outside with plastic bags on our hands! It must have been a funny sight… not sure there will be a next time, however!
      Thank you again – Heidi and Tim

      • I think chempadak is more similar to the jackfruit than the durian in terms of taste? Don’t worry, I eat durian with plastic bags on my hands too. 😉

        Maybe you could start off with a durian puff first before proceeding to the real fruit? The puff has a small amount of durian custard filling so you can get used to the smell. If you enjoy ice cream, there’s durian ice cream too by Four Seasons and they set up little shops in some shopping malls.

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