Low-sugar chocolate chip cookies recipe

Chocolate cookies without the feeling you're being naughty? Yes please.

These fabulous low-sugar chocolate chip cookies look great and taste even better. We've swapped out the usual sugar for a granulated sweetener to cut down on refined carbohydrates. There's also no butter in this recipe - or animal products of any (double check the dark chocolate chips are vegan-friendly). That means the recipe is suitable for vegetarians, vegans, anyone with a dairy intolerance, as well as anyone trying to cut down on sugar. This makes a batch of 16 biscuits which bake in under 10 minutes - so it's one of our quickest biscuit recipes.

Ingredients

• 125ml almond milk
• 2 tbsp ground flaxseeds
• 285g spelt flour
• 75g unsweetened cocoa powder (preferably raw)
• 1¼ tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 125ml sunflower oil
• 190g granulated sweetener of choice
• 1 tbsp vanilla extract
• 175g dark chocolate chips

Method

1. To make this cookies recipe, preheat the oven to 180˚C/350˚F/Gas mark 4 and line 2 baking sheets with foil.
2. Mix together the almond milk and ground flaxseeds and set aside to thicken for a few minutes.
3. Separately, whisk together the flour, cocoa powder and bicarbonate of soda in a large bowl.
4. Add the sunflower oil, sweetener and vanilla extract to the milk-seed mixture and stir thoroughly. After about 5 minutes you’ll start to see it thicken up even more.
5. Pour the liquid mixture into the bowl of dry ingredients and stir to combine. It will look far too liquidy to resemble regular cookie dough, so set it aside for about 10–15 minutes and you’ll see it change. Stir it again once thick.
6. Pinch off pieces of dough a little smaller than a golf ball and roll into balls between your hands. Flatten them to discs about 1cm thick and arrange on the prepared baking sheets. They will spread a lot during baking, so leave plenty of space between them.
7. Bake the cookies in the preheated oven for about 7 minutes, after which they will seem too soft to remove, but they will harden as they cool. Gently transfer the cookies to a wire rack to cool completely. They will still be gooey and soft in the middle, which for me is how a perfect cookie should be.

Top tip for making low-sugar chocolate chip cookies

Make sure you use a sweetener that is designed to be used in the same quantities as sugar (we like Silver Spoon Granulated Sweetener). You may find bakes that replace sugar with sweetener don't rise as well as ones with traditional sugar. This doesn't matter so much in biscuits as they don't really rise much in baking anyway.

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