Every once in a while my ice cream habit gets a bit out of hand, and I realize that I need to slow it down with the desserts for a while. I don’t have the willpower to completely eliminate dessert, and life is too short for such drastic measures anyway. Instead, I consider it an opportunity to broaden my horizons and try other desserts that are a bit healthier. I’ll admit that sometimes the actual result of my good intentions is a handful of fresh berries on top of my ice cream, but this time I took the ice-cream-free route and made chocolate chip cookies with whole wheat flour. I’m sure they would be delicious eaten with a big scoop of vanilla ice cream (or with ice cream sandwiched between two cookies), but that would defeat my purpose. With two cups of sugar and a cup of butter, these are not a health food, but if you’re going to eat a chocolate chip cookie anyway, it can’t hurt to have one made exclusively with whole wheat flour.
The recipe that I used is from Kim Boyce’s Good to the Grain, and you can find it here. You can find an altered version that adds oatmeal to the mix and looks super delicious here.
I was always under the impression that whole wheat flour had to be supplemented with all-purpose flour in baked goods, and this recipe makes it clear that that’s not the case. There’s more depth to these cookies than ones made from all-purpose flour, and they’re anything but chocolate-speckled bricks.
I baked these a day or two before I took off for Iowa and brought most of them home with me. My brother housed a number of them, so they are both tasty and excellent fuel for several hours of nonstop bird watching. My parents liked them, too, and if there hadn’t been Garrett’s caramel corn right next to the cookies, I think my dad would have eaten just as many as Bobby did.
