Aside from two occasions during the hols where I had some of the most delicious desert I’ve ever eaten (chocolate torte at The Noisy Oyster in Paternoster, if you want to know the deets) I am still sugar-free. Every day, I am still newly astonished at how easy it is to live like this – I expected to be climbing the walls with cravings, and running around the garden gnawing on flowers to try and suck some sweetness out of them, but it would seem that I am still relatively sane.
In the process of cutting sugar from my diet, I’ve been experimenting with substituting xylitol for sugar in some of my mom’s old recipes (handwritten in an old, flour-covered notebook that she began writing in the 70s) and have had great success with chocolate cake, less success with meringue, and lately, stunning success with pecan nut cookies.
Here’s the recipe, should you have a hankering to try it out:
pecan nut cookies
Sugar-Free Pecan Nut Cookie Recipe
125g margarine/butter
1 & 1/2 cups flour
2/3 cups of xylitol (that’s two thirds, by the way, not two or three!)
5ml vanilla essence
2ml caramel essence (not essential)
2 ml bicarb
1 beaten egg
80g chopped pecan nuts (I’ve found that almost every variation of this quantity works, so add more or less depending on how chunky you want your cookies to be)
- Soften the marge and mix all of the ingredients together, except for the nuts.
- Add the chopped nuts.
- Plop spoonfuls onto a baking tray, leaving some room for spreading, and bake at 190 degrees for 10 minutes.
- Leave to cool before munching down.
- Yum
Mmmn... cookies!
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