Raspberry Chocolate Chip Whole Wheat Cookies

Raspberry Chocolate Chip Whole Wheat Cookies

Get your taste-buds tingling with the flavor of Raspberry preserve and the most loved, chocolate chips. A healthy dessert made with whole wheat and unrefined cane sugar (jaggery powder), this surely is going to be a hit!!

 

Spring is almost here. I love that season for the vibrant colors and beautiful flowers, and the lovely weather to get yourself out and enjoy the nature. There are many people who absolutely love fall and winter season, but I guess winter is not for everyone. I love the beauty of fall colors and they are loved by many other people too, because of all the hues of yellow, orange and red leaves over the trees and scattered beautifully over the ground. It’s all so picturesque. But, for me, spring is the most beautiful season, I call it a season of love. My camera is out and the pink, purple and so many other colors of the flowers adorn the tress, shining to a full glory, sparkling gorgeously under the sun, and it seems like the world is beautiful again, after the harsh winters. Even the trees with only white flowers look so mesmerizing, like a divine abode.

Myra, just like me, is also fond of flowers. And we even did a shoot for her once when the spring season had just started. We took quite a few pictures, and she was all excited to get herself photographed. You do need a lot of patience when you want to photograph kids, but she was so happy that we had no idea where time went. It was a lot of fun for both of us.

Sharing a shot of our spring love!

My love for whole wheat bakes is no secret. Whole wheat flour is a staple in every Indian home. And any Indian mom will get a heart attack if her children say no to eating chapatis (Indian Flatbread) made with whole wheat flour. LOL. So, somehow that chapati love extended for me into the cookies as well. I have a container of oats flour lying on my kitchen shelf (I had specially ground the oats in food processor one day to try out some baking recipes), but somehow I end up creating bakes with whole wheat flour only. I guess I can try using the oats flour positively in the next recipe.

Anyway, since mornings for most of the kiddie households is no less than a war zone, with getting the kids ready, feeding them breakfast and getting their lunchboxes ready, I have found that for some days, the typical combination of bread and jam works wonders. We have one bottle of jam or fruit preserve in our fridge most of the times. This time we had got a bottle of Raspberry preserve from the local supermarket. And I thought of using that in my bakes.

The jam thumbprint cookies are pretty common, but I wanted to use the jam/preserve as an ingredient in one of my old recipes. And as usual, the Whole Wheat Chocolate Chip Cookies, which is the staple in my house, came to the rescue. As I researched more on using jam or preserve, I found that if I just mixed the jam inside the dough, it would change it’s color to pink. While my daughter loves pink, but the pink chocolate chip cookies that I saw on the internet were not too tempting. So, I went ahead with a technique mentioned here. You have to swirl the jam in the cookie dough without over mixing. Apparently, the raspberry chocolate chip cookies are famous as one of the Disneyland cookies. I have never been to Disneyland, but it is definitely a place to visit soon on our travel plans.

This is how I added the dollops of raspberry preserve over the flattened cookie dough, and the second picture here shows how the dough looked after I swirled the preserve over it using a butter knife.

The cookies had a hint of raspberry flavor, but if you want more prominent raspberry flavor, I would advise you to increase the quantity of jam, and also reduce the chocolate chips. Well, the chocolate chips had overpowered the jam here. Maybe only the jam cookies (without chocolate chips) would give a better flavor if you prefer to taste the raspberries in every bite.

There are few other whole wheat cookies recipes that you can try from here:

• Classic Chocolate Chip Cookies – With Whole Wheat Flour
• Whole Wheat And Chickpea Flour (Besan) Chocolate Chip Cookies
• Whole Wheat And Finger Millet (Ragi) Chocolate Cookies
• Nutella Stuffed Whole Wheat Chocolate Chip Cookies

Hope everyone is able to find something interesting to bake in this list.

Also, continuing the tradition, here comes my nineteenth recipe under My Julie & Julia Project. For those who don’t know, I had started this project last year, under which I had planned to post 100 recipes from my kitchen by the end of the year 2019. But since I got busy with other priorities in life, I have planned to continue the tradition in 2020. So, this is the Recipe #19.

Whole wheat flour and unrefined cane sugar are my pantry staples. If you have not switched to a healthy form of sugar as yet, I would advise you to do it now. Refined sugar is a big no no. You can use alternatives like unrefined cane sugar or jaggery powder. And there are many more options available in the market nowadays.

The butter I use in my bakes is always this unsalted butter (or you can use whatever brand is available with you). But if you want to use the salted one, you can definitely go ahead with it, just remember to omit the salt mentioned in the recipe. The chocolate chips I used are as always, the semi-sweet ones from Trader Joe’s, but feel free to use what you have available at hand.

Let’s get straight to the recipe. Happy baking everyone!!

Method (Step-by-step with pictures)

• Preheat oven to 375 degree F. Meanwhile, mix the butter and unrefined cane sugar (jaggery powder) till the sugar is completely blended with the butter. I prefer to mix by hand since I don’t use mixer. Whisk or spatula is not helpful in this case, since the butter is not in a completely melted state.

• Add in the egg to this mixture. Now add vanilla essence to the above mixture and stir till all the ingredients are uniformly mixed. The wet ingredients mixture is now ready.

• For the dry ingredients, mix in whole wheat flour, baking soda, baking powder and salt to the wet mixture.

• Finally add the chocolate chips and give it a good mix with hand. The dough will be a little loose at this stage, so it is advisable to put the dough in the fridge for at least 10-15 minutes.

• Remove the cookie dough from the refrigerator. Line a parchment paper and flatten the cookie dough on the parchment paper by pressing the dough.

• Sprinkle small dollops of raspberry preserve/jam over the flattened cookie dough. At this step, again put the dough in the fridge for around 15 minutes.

• Remove the flattened dough from the fridge. Using a butter knife, gently swirl the raspberry preserve/jam on the cookie dough (as shown in the picture). You just need to spread the raspberry preserve/jam softly over the entire dough area.

• Line a baking tray with parchment paper. Take around 2 tbsp of dough in your hands, and gently fold and form a ball, and flatten a little, so that the raspberry preserve does not spread out of the cookie. It sounds like a messy procedure, but definitely doable with a little precision. I was able to make 14 cookies with the prepared dough.

• Bake the cookies for 12-15 minutes in the preheated oven, or till you see creases on top of the cookies. The cookies will be soft to touch, but once cooled, they will be fine. It took me exactly 15 minutes to bake them to the right texture. Remove the cookies from the oven, and allow them to cool for at least 15-20 minutes.

The Raspberry Chocolate Chip Whole Wheat Cookies are now ready to be served warm or these can be stored in an air-tight container!! It is best to refrigerate the cookies for around 30-40 minutes.