What follows is less a recipe and more a warning. Today I made some cookies for the kids out of really healthy ingredients. They loved them, and also all hell broke loose.
I made the cookies using an amalgamation of recipes on the internet, which I found by googling ‘cacao almond cookies’. They all contained the following ingredients, in seemingly arbitrary quantities:
Ground almonds
Quinoa flour (I used flakes)
Chia seeds
Coconut oil
Baking powder
Cacao (unprocessed cocoa: I believe it is the heat-treatment that causes the a and the o to swap places)
Shredded coconut
Rice malt syrup
Coconut sugar (can you tell who has been following a bunch of worryingly thin Instagrammers who have all quit sugar?)
I mixed a quantity (again, arbitrary) of each ingredient together in a bowl, rolled the dough into some balls and baked them in the oven. They came out tasting all right, quite chocolaty, sweet enough, with a crunchy but crumbly texture. They looked, thanks to the white chia seeds, exactly like the bird poo you find around Moreton Bay Fig trees in Sydney.
After lunch, I let May Blossom and Garnet have one each. I left the room for a minute and May Blossom appeared to ask if she could have another one, because they were so delicious (the kid would eat a sock if you blended it with cacao). I said she could have another later this afternoon, when our friends come over, and she seemed okay with that. She went back in to Garnet, and about six seconds later he began to howl. ‘I think he’s just missing his Mummy,’ called May Blossom.
I went to check him and there he was, holding his half-eaten cookie, tears and snot streaming down his face, his mouth a gaping brown misery hole. I could not, for the life of me, figure out the problem. ‘May Blossom, do you know what’s wrong with him?’ I asked, baffled. Eventually he calmed down enough to splutter, ‘May Blossom bit my cookie!’
I charged May Blossom with two counts of disobedience: cookie theft, compounded by lying. Garnet refused to eat any more of his tainted cookie, so I got him another, as I told May Blossom that she would no longer be having one when her friends came over. She burst into tears of guilt and shame and fled upstairs to her room.
Garnet settled down to eat his cookie, and I went to put some clothes in the dryer. Not thirty seconds later, he was howling again. This time, it was because his cookie had gotten smaller. Because he had eaten part it. He was devastated. ‘I want a big cookie. My cookie is too smaller. I don’t like my smaller cookie,’ he wailed.
THEY AREN’T EVEN NICE COOKIES, I wanted to shout at them. How can boring cookies with such high nutritional qualities provoke such mayhem? They don’t even have anything nice in them. I would expect this sort of Shakespearean level of drama over my chocolate chip cookies, which are amazing. I expect this from brownies. I expect this from birthday cake. Not from these ashy textured health horrors.
So I don’t know. Make these, don’t make these…You’ll probably feel good about all the superfoods you’re getting into the kids, but just be aware that this combination could turn your children into thieving, lying, irrational little grumps.
But it’s the last day of the school holidays so they probably already are.
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