Christmas Cooking doesn’t have to be full of Saturated Fats
When I grew up we celebrated the four Sundays before Christmas (Advent Sundays) by lightning the candles on the advent wreath and my mother setting out one big plate of traditional Christmas baking. They were usually an assortment of cookies and treats rich in chocolate, marzipan and yule tide spices. If you’ve ever visited or come across German Christmas celebrations you will most likely have had your taste of ginger bread, cinnamon stars, dominos, caramelised almonds etc along with gluhwein, egg nog and other Christmas festive drinks.
Nowadays these goodies are sold worldwide bringing those tasty treats to all parts of the world. If you follow a no saturated and no cheap trans fats diet you will probably steer clear of those. Even if you want to so some home baking it will take a lot of tweaking to make these treats so that they comply with your dietary requirements.
Today’s recipe is very much a traditional recipe without much alterations. It doesn’t require any added fats. The only fat in theses cookies are the ones contained in the nuts naturally. So they are free from added fats. These cookies are baked at a low temperature and therefore the fat will maintain it’s healthy characteristics. So this is an easy recipe when it comes to making it compliant. It is somewhat different with other recipes as they tend to require large amounts of fats to make pastry crusts, puff pastry or yeasty doughs. Over the coming weeks I will post a few more of my favourite OMS diet compliant Christmas Baking recipes, so stay tuned.
An extra bonus of these cookies is that they contain no gluten. Making Christmas baking OMS complaint and gluten free, narrows down the possibilities. It is possible to have at least some traditional goodies for Christmas though and I encourage you to experiment with traditional recipes to make them fit your diet requirements.
I enjoy these cookies a lot and I don’t just bake them for Christmas. In the photo you can see that I don’t just use star cookie cutters. They are a lovely treat with an afternoon latté with soya milk.
Ingredients for Almond Cinnamon Cookies
- 3 egg whites
- 8.5 oz/250 g icing sugar
- 1 tbs vanilla sugar
- 1tsp cinnamon
- 14 oz/400 g ground hazelnuts or a mix of ground almonds and hazelnuts
Preparation Fat Free Christmas Cookies
- Whip the egg whites until they are thick enough that they are a solid fluff.
- Sieve the icing sugar and mix it into the egg white.
- Put 2-3 tbs of the sugary egg white to one side for the decorative coating.
- Mix the vanilla sugar, cinnamon and nut flour and then fold about 5 oz/150g of mix into the egg white.
- Gradually add the remaining nut mix to the dough until you are left with a dough you can handle without it sticking to your fingers.
- Dust the work surface with icing sugar and roll out the dough to about about ½ cm.
- Using (star shaped) cookie cutters cut out the biscuits and place them on a sheet of baking paper (quantity makes two sheets).
- Brush the top of the biscuits with the reserved egg white sugar mix.
- Pre-heat the oven to 300˚F/150˚C.
- Bake the biscuits on the lowest shelf for 25 minutes.
- Remove from oven and let the cookies cool on a wire rack. They should still feel slightly soft in the centre.